Destructive and Supportive Leadership in Extremis: Relationships With Post-Traumatic Stress During Combat Deployments

Abstract: Few studies have investigated leadership in extremis: dangerous contexts such as those encountered by deployed military personnel. This study investigated whether supportive and destructive leadership by deployed U.S. Army noncommissioned officers predicted reports of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by 773 junior enlisted soldiers. Both forms of leadership interacted with unit-level combat exposure such that destructive leadership predicted PTSD in units with high or low exposure and supportive leadership only predicted PTSD in units with high exposure. Although leadership is often assumed more important in extremis, this may be true only for supportive leadership; destructive leadership appears detrimental regardless of context.