commonwealth journal of academic research

This is a position paper which examines followers and environment as core contributory elements in the emergence of Toxic school leaders in the school systems. Leaders, followers and their environment are the power base for the leadership itself. Therefore, leaders are helpless sometimes too. This means that, they can be wrongly motivated in a direction that will not be beneficial to the school organisations by their followers. Occasionally, effective school leaders turn out making poor decisions because the ambitious followers are joined into a single entity and persuasive about a plan to achieve a goal. It is important for the school leaders to be more incredulous of the preponderance perspectives of the followers to look into their views more closely. At a different time, leaders get into difficulty because they are encircled by followers who are ambitious, eulogise the leaders with flattery words and insulate the leaders from discomforting actualities. Any organisation that tolerates any act of toxicity from its leaders will be more likely to breed conformers and colluders as followers, so the environment plays an important role in immortalising toxic leaders’ behaviours. The connection between the leaders, their followers, and the environment can be leverage to the toxicity outcome of the leaders. It is hard for toxic leaders to come off in stalwart organisations with stout establishments where adequate checks and balances on power and control are monitored.