The Problem With Passive Leadership: When Doing Nothing Hurts

We work to achieve financial security, pursue professional growth, and, if we are lucky, explore our curiosity and serve the greater good.

Regardless of the work we do, leadership plays a central role in shaping our experiences. The bureaucratic structure, administrative climate, and to whom we report influence our engagement and career trajectory.

Leaders possess their own styles, often adapting to the institution’s prevailing culture. Some styles are more readily identifiable, such as transactional and transformational leadership approaches. However, others operate quietly behind the scenes, leaving employees flummoxed when trying to decipher the expectations and organizational norms that shape their job responsibilities.

Transactional and Transformational Leadership Approaches

Identifying types of leadership is a messy game, for classifications can be limiting. Nonetheless, despite potential drawbacks, placing leaders into buckets according to their qualities provides a framework for examining behavioral markers that shape employees’ work lives.

Transactional and transformational leadership are two styles that exist along a continuum. Transactional leaders view their job in terms of task management, daily checking off the to-do list in search of a clean slate. These leaders tend to be efficient and reliable, yet in their quest to clear the decks, they view the people who report to them in terms of tasks, too. In other words, employees’ worth is not determined by their expertise, skills, innovation, or broad-based humanity, but is assigned according to their willingness and ability to complete mandated tasks efficiently (Johnson & Klee, 2007).

Inside this transaction, goals are often short-term and disconnected. Employees are rewarded for compliance, and scapegoating may be utilized when problems arise. To ensure efficiency in completing the job, decisions are made top-down, discussions are minimal, and cross-collaboration is rare, as it is seen as time-consuming and unpredictable. When committee work is undertaken, it can be performative, as the decision may already have been made by management (Johnson & Klee, 2007). Within these autocratic environments, curiosity is stifled, leading to feelings of disempowerment and employee disengagement. Consequently, innovation and growth are often hampered (Dong, 2023).

Conversely, transformational leaders look past the horizon, setting long-term goals aligned with a cohesive and aspirational mission. Transformational leaders view employees as co-constructors and collaborators, therefore extending the autonomy and trust necessary for creativity to thrive. Listening and empathetic care frame interactions, and when conflicts arise, discussions are encouraged, feedback is clear, and outcomes are transparent. To keep morale and engagement high, transformational leaders invest in professional development and coaching, supporting employees’ professional goals, leading to strong rates of knowledge sharing and satisfaction (Chaman et al., 2021; Specchia et al., 2021).

The Problem With Passivity

At times, however, it is difficult to define a boss’s leadership style because it operates like an iceberg, revealing very little yet sustaining a complex ecosystem below the waterline. This outwardly passive approach is deliberately opaque and is often adopted by leaders who value conformity, resist change, and avoid direct conversations (Barling & Frone, 2017).

Passive leadership presents in two primary ways: passive-avoidant, in which leaders deflect or ignore problems, and passive-aggressive, where problems are handled covertly. It is not unusual for passive leaders to switch between the two modes (Sims et al., 2021; Specchia et al., 2021). For example, if an employee reports an ongoing bullying situation to her passive manager, the manager may at first take a passive-avoidant stance, deflecting the problem by urging the employee to ignore the bullying behavior. Later, when the problem persists and escalates, as bullying situations tend to do, and the employee resurfaces the concern, this time the manager shifts into a passive-aggressive mode, blaming the offended instead of the perpetrator for the conflict.

Leaders often adopt passive-avoidant and passive-aggressive styles because they doubt their ability to navigate complex situations and possess a high need for superiors’ approval; therefore, they attempt to avoid or conceal situations that highlight problems within their purview (Dóci et al., 2015). Consequently, incivility often spreads in passive environments because behaviors go unchecked (Harold & Holtz, 2015).

This fear of confrontation makes passive leaders reticent to provide feedback and drives them to limit their interactions with direct reports to surface-level conversations (Vullinghs et al., 2018).

When assigning leadership roles, passive leaders select passive employees they know will tow the party line and avoid making waves. In addition, passive leaders seldom coach or mentor, finding such endeavors too intimate and messy (Sims et al., 2021). Instead, as with transactional approaches, passive leaders disproportionately focus on task management, thereby divorcing themselves from the human side of work.

Employees who work for passive leaders often find their institutional trust eroding, as they witness compounding problems left unaddressed in an effort to avoid scrutiny and maintain the status quo (Holtz & Hu, 2017; Sims et al., 2021). Such environments are especially problematic for innovative employees, as they find their autonomy reduced and their ability to outwardly address complex problems they are eager to take on suppressed (Johnson & Klee, 2007).

In this way, passive leaders are active contributors to a declining workplace culture (Dóci et al., 2015).

A Solution in Servant Leadership

Instead of standing beneath the spotlight, like transformational leaders, servant leaders walk behind, leading by example as they continue to engage in ethically focused, authentic work.

As passive leadership is tangentially connected to transactional approaches, with its overemphasis on tasks at the cost of people, servant leadership intersects with transformational styles, both of which require a strong vision and commitment to employees’ professional growth and well-being. However, whereas transformational leaders create the vision and direct change themselves, servant leaders, guided by a strong moral compass, decentralize authority and construct inclusive communities through shared decision-making (Lee et al., 2020).

For servant leaders, nurturing the whole person is central to their work; therefore, they help employees develop their unique talents and support employee-directed projects that extend past their job descriptions. This investment in people increases employee trust, engagement, commitment, and retention while fostering an innovative environment that thrives (Panaccio et al., 2015; Specchia et al., 2021; Sun et al., 2024).