The relationship between toxic leadership, work stress and work engagement: A study on research assistants in 50/d staff

In this study, a model has been designed to address the role of work stress in the relationship between toxic leadership and work engagement. Accordingly, this study aims to identify the participants' levels of toxic leadership, work stress, and work engagement and to empirically reveal the relational structure between these concepts with the help of the collected data. The data were gathered from research assistants working on a 50/d staff basis at state universities in Turkey. The study used the Toxic Leadership Scale developed by Schimdt (2008), the Work Stress Scale developed by House and Rizzo (1972), and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale developed by Schaufeli (2002) as data collection tools. To analyze the data, reliability analyses, descriptive statistics, validating factor analyses, t-tests and ANOVA analyses, and a structural equality model were used, and the analyzes were performed in AMOS and SPSS programs. As a result of the analyzes carried out, it was determined that the research assistants' perceptions of toxic leadership were moderate, and their work stress and work engagement levels were high. The analyzes performed to detect the differences between participants' demographic features and toxic leadership, work stress, and work engagement showed that some features were different. According to the results of SEM analyses, toxic leadership has a positive impact on work stress and negative impact on work engagement, while work stress does not have a meaningful effect on work engagement. That being said, no role of work stress has been identified in the impact of toxic leadership on work engagement.