Why Toxic Bosses Exhaust Some Employees More Than Others: New Psychology Research Explained

Monday, June 29, 2026.

What a surprising study on dark personality traits may reveal about workplace burnout—and why neurodivergent employees deserve a closer look.

This article discusses a study of toxic supervision and Dark Triad personality traits. The discussion of neurodivergent employees is an evidence-informed clinical interpretation based on Conservation of Resources Theory and should not be read as a direct finding of the study itself.

By 9:17 Monday morning, the meeting has already gone sideways.

Someone has been corrected for a mistake they didn't make.

Someone else's idea has quietly changed ownership.

The manager has announced a new priority that directly contradicts last week's priority, apparently without noticing.

No one says much.

Everyone updates their résumé a little in their head.

There is an old saying that people do not quit jobs—they quit managers. Like most clichés, it has survived because it contains enough truth to be irritatingly durable.

For decades, organizational psychologists have demonstrated that toxic supervisors increase stress, erode trust, damage morale, and eventually send employees toward the exit.

Some managers humiliate people publicly.

Others quietly claim credit for work that was never theirs.

Still others create workplaces where expectations change without explanation and success depends less on doing good work than on correctly interpreting the boss's latest mood.

Most of us have worked for at least one person who made Sunday afternoon feel shorter simply because Monday morning was approaching.

But anyone who has survived an unhealthy workplace has probably noticed something else.

Not everyone leaves carrying the same weight.

Two employees can report to the same supervisor, sit through the same impossible meetings, receive the same contradictory feedback, and yet arrive home with remarkably different levels of exhaustion.

One shrugs it off.

The other lies awake replaying conversations, wondering what they missed, what they should have said differently, or whether tomorrow will bring another change in expectations.

Why?

A recent study published in Psychology of Leaders and Leadership offers a surprisingly nuanced answer.

• The researchers argue that toxic supervision steadily drains psychological resources such as confidence, emotional energy, attention, and well-being.

• More surprisingly, they found that some personality styles appear to protect those resources better than others.

It's an unexpected finding.

It also raises a question the researchers themselves did not ask.

What if employees don't begin the workday with the same psychological reserve?

That possibility may be especially important when we think about neurodivergent employees.

Before we get there, though, it's worth understanding what the researchers actually found.

Looking beyond the bad boss

Most research on toxic leadership concentrates on the supervisor.

• What makes someone abusive?

• Why do certain leaders become exploitative?

• What organizational cultures allow destructive management to flourish?

Alexis Hanna and colleagues chose a different angle.

Instead of asking why some managers become toxic, they asked why employees exposed to the same kind of toxic leadership often experience dramatically different outcomes.

Their framework came from Conservation of Resources Theory, first developed by psychologist Stevan Hobfoll. The theory proposes something both simple and remarkably powerful.

Stress occurs when folks lose resources they value—or when they fear those resources are slipping away.

Those resources include obvious things like income and job security.

But they also include psychological resources.

Confidence.

Attention.

Hope.

Emotional energy.

The ability to concentrate.

The sense that your work matters.

Every difficult interaction at work draws from that account.

A supportive supervisor occasionally makes a deposit.

A toxic one makes withdrawals all day long.

Public criticism chips away at confidence.

Unpredictable expectations consume attention.

Micromanagement erodes autonomy.

Office politics require constant vigilance.

Eventually employees aren't merely tired.

They're psychologically overdrawn.

Anyone who has driven home after a day of navigating an impossible boss knows the feeling.

You may not have accomplished much, yet somehow you're completely exhausted.

That's because not all work involves producing something.

Some of it involves enduring something.

Measuring toxicity more carefully

One strength of the study is that the researchers resisted treating all bad bosses as though they were the same.

Instead, they divided toxic supervision into three distinct patterns:

The first was abusive supervision—the kind most people immediately recognize. This includes humiliating employees, ridiculing them, belittling their work, or treating them with open hostility.

The second was exploitative supervision, where managers advance themselves at the expense of their employees. These supervisors take credit for other people's accomplishments, manipulate subordinates for personal gain, or view employees primarily as tools for their own advancement.

The third was psychopathic supervision, which reflects more enduring personality characteristics such as chronic dishonesty, lack of empathy, impulsivity, and emotional callousness.

That's an important distinction.

Not every toxic boss yells.

Some smile warmly while quietly sacrificing everyone else's career to improve their own.

The researchers recruited 231 full-time employees from a wide range of occupations.

Each participant completed detailed assessments of their supervisor's behavior, their own personality, psychological distress, mental well-being, intentions to quit, and the quality of their relationship with their manager.

Here's a clever methodological detail that deserves mention.

The researchers worried that disgruntled employees might exaggerate how awful their bosses really were.

So they asked participants to recruit a coworker who reported to the same supervisor and have that coworker independently evaluate the manager's behavior.

The two sets of ratings matched remarkably well.

In other words, these weren't simply employees venting after a bad week.

Different people were describing the same patterns.

Three months later, the researchers contacted participants again to determine whether they had received raises or promotions.

That follow-up produced one of the study's more surprising findings.

The damage was real—but uneven

Much of the data confirmed what decades of workplace research have already demonstrated.

Employees working under toxic supervisors reported more psychological distress.

They were more likely to think about quitting.

They described significantly poorer relationships with their managers.

None of that is particularly surprising.

If anything, it reassures us that the study was actually measuring something real.

Two findings, however, stood out.

• First, toxic supervision was not significantly associated with lower overall mental well-being, a result the researchers had expected but did not find.

• Second—and far more surprising—employees working under toxic supervisors were somewhat more likely to report career advancement than those working under healthier managers.

That finding deserves caution.

The study cannot tell us why it occurred.

Perhaps high-pressure organizations reward political behavior.

Perhaps employees who survive toxic environments become unusually visible.

Perhaps managers promote people who resemble themselves.

Or perhaps something else entirely is happening.

The data cannot answer that question.

What the study can tell us is that toxic workplaces are often more complicated than they first appear.

They may damage well-being while simultaneously rewarding certain employees.

Which brings us to the most surprising finding of all.

The meeting comes home

One of the quiet frustrations of adulthood is that exhaustion rarely stays where it was created.

Very few couples argue about a performance review.

They argue about dishes.

About forgotten errands.

About someone scrolling through their phone instead of listening.

About a partner who seems distracted, impatient, or emotionally absent.

By the time the conversation reaches the kitchen table, the original source of the depletion has often disappeared from view.

Couples therapists see this pattern constantly.

One partner walks through the front door with remarkably little left to give.

The other partner sees only the silence.

Or the irritability.

Or the short answer that somehow turns into a longer argument.

The marriage gets blamed.

Sometimes the marriage is simply where the exhaustion becomes visible.

This is one reason I found the study so compelling.

It reminds us that work does not merely consume hours.

It consumes attention, emotional energy, and executive functioning—the very capacities we rely upon to be patient spouses, attentive parents, and decent conversationalists.

Some people arrive home with plenty left in the tank.

Others have spent the day making withdrawals from an account that was already running low.

That doesn't excuse treating the people we love poorly.

It does suggest we should become more curious about where the depletion began.

What organizations should learn

The researchers are careful not to romanticize the Dark Triad.

They are not suggesting organizations should hire more narcissists or promote people who are emotionally detached.

If anything, the findings reinforce the opposite conclusion.

Every group of employees in the study experienced greater distress under toxic supervision.

Every group reported stronger intentions to leave.

The Dark Triad appeared to soften some outcomes.

It did not transform toxic workplaces into healthy ones.

The simplest lesson remains the best one.

Don't create toxic workplaces.

The authors recommend that organizations regularly assess supervisory behavior rather than assuming employee turnover is simply a hiring problem.

That strikes me as sensible.

Exit interviews tell you who has already left.

Healthy organizations pay attention before people begin polishing their résumés.

There is another practical implication as well.

Clear communication is remarkably inexpensive.

Written expectations cost almost nothing.

Consistent feedback costs nothing.

Predictable routines cost very little.

Explaining why priorities changed takes only a few extra minutes.

Managers often believe these are acts of generosity.

They are not.

They are examples of competence.

Reducing unnecessary ambiguity preserves psychological resources for everyone.

Neurodivergent employees may especially appreciate that clarity, but in truth almost nobody has ever complained that their manager was too clear.

Final Thoughts

The longer I sat with this study, the less I thought about dark personalities and the more I thought about invisible costs.

Psychology often asks why some people appear more resilient than others.

Perhaps we should occasionally ask a different question:

How much of their energy had already been spent before the real stress even began?

Two employees can look equally productive from the outside while carrying very different cognitive loads.

One spent the day completing assignments.

The other spent the day completing assignments and deciphering contradictory expectations, managing uncertainty, recovering from unnecessary conflict, and trying to predict what tomorrow's rules might be.

Both worked eight hours.

They did not perform the same job.

Burnout is often described as working too much.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes, however, burnout is the predictable consequence of spending all day trying to understand an environment that refuses to make sense.

That distinction matters.

Especially for managers.

A good manager reduces uncertainty.

A poor manager manufactures it.

One leaves employees with enough energy to have dinner with their families.

The other unknowingly sends home people who have already spent the best part of themselves somewhere between the Monday morning meeting and the Friday afternoon status update.

If you're fortunate enough to lead other people, here's a simple question worth asking.

When your employees leave your office, do they have more clarity than when they walked in?

Or more confusion?

Because managers often believe they're assigning work.

Sometimes they're assigning interpretation.

The first builds organizations.

The second quietly exhausts the people who keep those organizations running.

And that's the tragedy of the toxic boss.

The damage rarely ends at five o'clock.

It follows someone home, sits quietly at the dinner table, shortens a conversation with a spouse, steals a little patience from a child, and returns to the office the next morning ready to begin again.

No one lists those costs on a balance sheet.

They may be the most expensive costs of all.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Hanna, A., Jones, D. N., & Hom, P. W. (2026). Dark Triad personality traits as buffers against toxic supervision. Psychology of Leaders and Leadership. Advance online publication. (Update the volume, issue, page numbers, and DOI when available.)

Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513

Hobfoll, S. E. (2001). The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress process: Advancing Conservation of Resources Theory. Applied Psychology, 50(3), 337–421. https://doi.org/10.1111/1464-0597.00062

Hobfoll, S. E., Halbesleben, J. R. B., Neveu, J.-P., & Westman, M. (2018). Conservation of Resources in the organizational context: The reality of resources and their consequences. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5, 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104640

Schaufeli, W. B., & Taris, T. W. (2014). A critical review of the Job Demands–Resources Model: Implications for improving work and health. In G. F. Bauer & O. Hämmig (Eds.), Bridging occupational, organizational and public health(pp. 43–68). Springer.

Tepper, B. J. (2000). Consequences of abusive supervision. Academy of Management Journal, 43(2), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.2307/1556375