Effect of Toxic Leadership Style on Organizational Cynicism and Job Alienation of Staff in the Sports and Youth Ministry of Iran with a Mediating Role of Machiavellianism

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of toxic leadership style on organizational cynicism and job alienation among the staff in the Sports and Youth Ministry of Iran with a mediating role of Machiavellianism. The methodology was descriptive and applied research. The population of the study consisted of all members of the official staff in the Sports and Youth Ministry (335 people). The sample was 180 individuals who were randomly selected using Morgan's table. The instruments used for the research were four standard questionnaires: Schmidt toxic leadership (2008), Ruth Klaus Machiavellian questionnaire (2009), Kalagan organizational cynicism questionnaire (2009) and Bani and Rissel job alienation questionnaire (2007). The content validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by six faculty members from Razi University. The reliability of the questionnaires was 89.8, 0.87, 0.88 and 0.84, respectively. The Pearson correlation coefficient and path analysis model were used to analyze the data in SPSS and Amos software. The results showed that toxic leadership has a positive effect on organizational cynicism and job alienation, with 0.53 and 0.50 impact factors, respectively. It can be argued that Machiavellianism played a mediating role with a 0.32 and 0.34 impact factor for toxic leadership on organizational cynicism and job alienation, respectively. The results suggest that managers should minimize poisonous behavior as much as possible in their leadership style, because the existence and continuation of such negative behavior ultimately distracts the attention from the organization and its human resources and provides conditions for pessimism and alienation of employees of the organization.