Trust

In a team context, one major consequence of incompetent and toxic leaders is the breach of employee trust. Trust is defined as the intention to accept vulnerability based on positive expectations of another’s intentions or behaviors (Kähkönen, Reference Kähkönen2021), making it crucial for team effectiveness (Kähkönen et al., Reference Kähkönen, Blomqvist, Gillespie and Vanhala2021). When a team experiences a breach or violation of trust, it can undermine commitment, cooperation, knowledge sharing, and problem solving. These trust violations are thought to originate from breaches in three areas: ability (skills, training), benevolence (support and concern for others), and integrity (accountability, transparency) (Kähkönen et al., Reference Kähkönen, Blomqvist, Gillespie and Vanhala2021; Mayer et al., Reference Mayer, Davis and Schoorman1995). The type of leader-related trust violation likely determines the most appropriate pathways to trust repair, as toxic and incompetent leadership tends to manifest through different forms of trust violations. For instance, Tepper (Reference Tepper2000) found that abusive supervision, often associated with toxic leadership, can lead to fear, emotional distress, withdrawal, and reduced voice, which can break down team trust and violate perceptions of benevolence and integrity. On the other hand, incompetent leadership is more likely to represent a breach of ability. Regardless of the type of violation, repairing trust is a complex process. Once trust has been violated, any restored trust is structurally different from the original relationship and may remain fragile, especially when the breach is severe (Kähkönen et al., Reference Kähkönen, Blomqvist, Gillespie and Vanhala2021).

Team recovery for toxic versus ineffective leadership likely differs, given sources of trust violations that emerge from team interactions with their leader. Team recovery strategies focused on ability-based violations associated with incompetent leadership can often be repaired through demonstrating improved competency levels. Integrity-based violations based on toxic leadership are inherently more difficult to repair because they violate employees’ assumptions about fairness, respect, and moral treatment within the organization. Research suggests that once these deeper relational expectations are violated, restored trust tends to remain conditional (Kähkönen et al., Reference Kähkönen, Blomqvist, Gillespie and Vanhala2021).

Team resilience

According to Hartmann et al. (Reference Hartmann, Weiss and Hoegl2025), team resilience is defined as a dynamic process of adaptation. It is the observable enactment of specific strategies and the mobilization of team resources used to maintain or return to high functioning when faced with disruption (Fisher et al., Reference Fisher, LeNoble and Vanhove2023; Hartmann et al., Reference Hartmann, Weiss and Hoegl2025). This resilience process is fundamentally contingent upon the specific type of adversity the team encounters. When toxic and incompetent leadership are differentiated as distinct forms of adversity, the strategies a team mobilizes and the resources they choose to enact will differ significantly. Ultimately, the unfolding of resilience takes place when a team reorganizes its coordination and support strategies to positively adapt to the specific pressures of each leadership type (Hartmann et al., Reference Hartmann, Weiss and Hoegl2025; Raetze et al., Reference Raetze, Steputat-Raetze, Mueller, Maynard and Schmutz2025). When teams face incompetent leadership, the leader’s shortcomings are likely attributed to a lack of ability rather than malicious intent. Teams may experience disorder, inefficiency, frustration, or role confusion due to a lack of sufficient direction provided, but the underlying foundations of trust and goodwill often remain intact. When a leader’s failures stem from lack of ability rather than malice, employees often perceive them as acting in good faith, which softens the impact of the adverse context and preserves a baseline of trust (Ducheyne & De Fruyt). In these contexts, helping behavior might represent the most effective strategy for teams to bridge the gaps left by the leader’s technical or strategic deficits. As Hartmann et al. (2020) suggest, this is a form of collective efficacy where members self-organize to ensure organizational goals are met despite the leader’s lack of guidance. In this context, recovery is straightforward; once the leader is trained or replaced, the team can stop compensating for deficits and return to optimal functioning.

As a result, recovery can focus on restoring competence-based trust through leadership development efforts, clearer role structures, and improved communication. The shortcomings of the leader can be easily addressed and corrected, allowing the team to reestablish normal team functions and processes without the interference of damage to the relational fabric of the team.

In contrast, toxic leaders often use manipulation or intimidation to maintain control, undermining key emergent states such as trust and the team’s health, leading to a more complex recovery process (Traylor et al., Reference Traylor, Dinh, LeNoble, Paoletti, Shuffler, Wiper and Salas2024). A lack of trust within the team likely amplifies individual vigilance toward possible threats from the leader and fellow members. This context represents a more severe form of adversity that likely results in employee exhaustion and a team climate defined by anxiety and silence, as members prioritize staying safe over taking risks (Ducheyne & De Fruyt). Under toxic leaders, even the most resilient teams may expend significant effort to provide social support, somewhat of a team-level version of emotion-focused coping that helps members survive the toxic environment. Yet, these teams are still likely to experience process loss, operating substantially below their potential.

Team recovery

Team recovery requires structural changes and deliberate relational repair, including acknowledgment of wrongdoings, transparent communication, and accountability from leadership moving forward. Even after a toxic leader is removed, team members may continue to experience lingering fear or skepticism toward leadership, expecting the worst from new leaders. These residual effects can suppress voice behaviors long after the threat has disappeared, as employees remain uncertain whether the organization will protect them from future harm. Destructive leadership thrives when institutional checks and balances are lacking (Padilla et al., Reference Padilla, Hogan and Kaiser2007). When an organization relies on a team’s resilience to navigate toxic leadership, it places psychological strain on the team. Eventually, this affects not only the team’s capacity to recover from future events but also its performance (Schyns, & Schilling Reference Schyns and Schilling2013).

We argue that shared leadership can also be helpful for recovery after toxic and incompetent leadership. Wang et al. (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) define shared leadership as “an emergent team property that results from the distribution of leadership influence across multiple team members” (p. 181). The use of shared leadership during the recovery phase is contingent upon whether the preceding failure was technical or relational. In cases of incompetent leadership, where the team lacks task-related guidance, shared leadership serves as a temporary solution. Wang et al. (Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014) demonstrate that in high-complexity environments, such as organizational restructuring or teams dealing with leadership absence, shared leadership is significantly more effective than in low-complexity settings. This allows for a process of distributed cognition, wherein the collective pooling of team expertise serves as a functional buffer against the performance risks posed by a formal leader’s incompetence or absence. In contrast, under toxic leadership, shared leadership can function as a relational repair mechanism. Research suggests that shared leadership is positively associated with emergent team states, indicating that distributing leadership across team members can help rebuild trust and empower team members to reclaim team agency (Wang et al., Reference Wang, Waldman and Zhang2014). By replacing a singular, centralized authority with a network of mutual influence, the team can address the relational complexity left by a toxic leader.

Team recovery from incompetent and toxic leaders cannot rely on team efforts alone. It must be approached through a multilevel support system that allows teams and their members to draw from organizational resources (Fisher et al., Reference Fisher, LeNoble and Vanhove2023; Hartmann et al., Reference Hartmann, Weiss, Newman and Hoegl2020). Although incompetence may require a technical solution to overcome ability deficits, toxicity requires a repair of the team’s critical emergent states, especially affective states like trust. Although future research will need to explore how the recovery process unfolds differently for teams facing each form of failed leadership, existing models of team resilience would suggest that recovering from toxic leadership will require a greater breadth and depth of resources as well as a longer recovery timeline. At the individual level, the organization will need to provide resources to replenish the depleted psychological capital of team members. At the team level, support will likely focus on “unlearning” any defensive habits developed during the crisis that were helpful individual-level resilience strategies but undermine team effectiveness (Fisher et al., Reference Fisher, LeNoble and Vanhove2023), such as hypervigilance and risk aversion. Without these repairs, organizations are asking too much by letting the burden of monitoring leadership quality fall on followers in compromised, disrupted teams; it is unlikely that efforts suggested by the focal article (Ducheyne & De Fruyt) to solicit feedback about leadership quality concerns will ever be met with honest responses.