For those who are not familiar with my work, while I start the process of defending and finishing my dissertation on remote work, I teach at California State University Stanislaus and East Bay.  Specifically, I teach Operations Management. I add a component on Remote Leadership and Remote Work from my research to help prepare future Business Leaders for the growing change to a virtual and hybrid workplace. I touched on the topic of Workplace PTSD and its relationship between what is referred to by business practitioners as Toxic Leadership and what is academically called X Type Leadership. Many of us have examples of bad leaders we have dealt with in our careers, especially at the earlier stages.  There are also managers whose leadership style doesn’t translate properly in a remote workplace and can come off as toxic.  Further remote work makes it so that toxic leaders are exposed and documented.

Working as a lecturer for the State of California in the CSU system is a government teaching position.  It was recently brought up in a meeting about how to help be more trauma-informed to help our students adjust to changes from high school to college, junior college to a four-year university, and from university to the world beyond. However, something to consider is how school and workplace violence are already traumatizing students and government employees.

Such as for teachers, even those of us who teach remotely are trained in what to do in the event of an active shooter. My friends who teach in the public K-12 system and other parents of young children advised while schools teach kids how to deal with active shooter scenarios, much like they would an earthquake drill, there are additional things suggested.  Like for me to get my kids and myself bulletproof backpack shields and blood tablets and learn to play dead.  When this was discussed with my colleagues, we all ended up crying.  Further, it was discussed about government buildings having massive violent protests like what happened in Oregon during the lockdowns.  The growing trend of violent protests has made it, so government worker unions have been able to negotiate remote work in an effort to keep people safe.  There is also the recent incident of someone attacking a congresswoman’s spouse in their own home in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the work culture tends to back these leaders and other factors causing unrest because they produce a lot although they have a revolving door of employees and a bad reputation, rather than calculating all the exit interviews and other Human Resources data to analyze how this is not a sustainable leadership model.  Much like micromanagement, these sort of leadership tactics is only meant to be used in short bursts as needed, not a consistent method of leadership.  In these cases, those managers don’t know how to lead and instead mix up fear with respect.  This mixes up can have devastating implications past how it can hurt a business.

Workplace PTSD is a topic that has been studied mostly in psychology for decades now at an academic level and has been warned about the increases that happened during the 2008 financial crisis.  The news has been reporting incidents of workplace violence when it goes horribly wrong and results in shots fired or counting the dead. The news and academic research have even found an uptick in workplace violence, especially since the COVID Pandemic.