Transforming Toxicity into Trust: Leadership Interventions for Sustainable Employee Engagement and Workplace Well-Being

Abstract

Toxic Leadership have very well documented adverse effects but much less empirical attention has been devoted to assessing specific leadership interventions as remedies to this harm. This quasi-experimental study aims to compare workplace outcomes before and after a 12-month multi-modal leader-level intervention program on employee engagement, trust and well-being in organizations with previously established high levels of toxic leadership (N = 876 employees, 124 leaders). The intervention included five integrated components: executive coaching, leadership training workshops, anonymous feedback systems, reforms of organizational policies, and cultural audit processes. Repeated-measures ANOVA results showed significant increases from pre- to post-intervention in trust in leadership (F(1,874) = 142.6, p < 0.001, η² = 0.14); employee engagement (F(1,874) = 189.3, p < 0.001, η² = 0.18); and well-being indices (F(1,874) = 128.4, p < 0.001, η² = 0.13), as illustrated in Table 1. In a final step of hierarchical regression analysis, coaching and mentoring explained the most unique variance in improvement in engagement (ΔR² = 0.11) and were followed by policy reforms (ΔR² = 0.08). The study gives the practical steps to transforming from toxic operation cultures to trust-based leadership cultures. New research finds that leadership interventions provide the largest boost to employee engagement when it comes to trust which impacts work-related well-being and positive organizational transformation