Why Team Members Tolerate a Tyrannical Leader

Like people, leaders come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. Along the continuum of benevolent to malevolent, a small slice of leaders has developed a harsh and highly coercive style, bordering on cruelty. 

They berate, admonish, embarrass, ridicule, and threaten their way to the results they believe are more important than people. In far too many cases, they direct a group of loyal team members who remain committed and dedicated to them. The question is why? 

Talented team members are highly resilient and adapt to whatever is thrown at them. They value their colleagues, focus on their work, and often learn to accept the flaws of a brutish leader. Over time, they come to prefer a leader they know to one who they don’t know and who might be worse. 

Despite the difficulties of dealing with the abuse a tyrannical leader displays, they hunker down and accept that things aren’t as bad as they could be. They trudge on and soon come to normalize behavior that anyone on the outside would view as highly inappropriate and offensive. 

To someone new to the team or on the outside looking in, the acceptance of a malevolent leader borders on insanity. Why would anyone, much less an entire team, tolerate the bad behavior of such a monstrous leader? Enter what is known as the Stockholm Syndrome. 

The Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response to abuse, and it applies as much to leadership as it does to cases of child abuse and hostage situations. The Syndrome predicts that with consistent mistreatment, people sometimes develop positive feelings and an emotional attachment to their abusers. 

This is a result of an unconscious strategy of survival that makes the situation more bearable. To those on the receiving end of coercive behavior, justifying the malevolent acts of a tyrannical leader and adopting a positive attachment to them is a way to successfully survive and endure the abuse without encouraging even more harsh punishment.  

Those with this Syndrome in the leadership space will often deny how badly they are treated and rally to the defense of a leader or coach who they believe pushes them to achieve and brings out the best in them. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they come to view the leader as a passionate and overly intense figurehead who steps over the line because they care so much. Breaking the force of this view is exceedingly difficult. 

For those of us on the outside of this unusual theater, knowing how and why this occurs doesn’t make the ongoing scene any easier to watch or accept. Encouraging those we care about to experience benevolent leaders in other settings will sometimes create an opening to discuss the boundaries self-respect requires. Unfortunately for the world, there are far too many tyrannical leaders to go around.