Studying negative aspects in work organizations: The benefits of qualitative methodologies

The aim of this paper is to encourage researchers to employ qualitative methodologies when studying the negative aspects in educational leadership. To this end, I focus on one negative aspect in organization – abusive leadership and use it to exemplify the benefits of qualitative research and its potential methodologies. More specifically, I pose two questions: (1) How can the qualitative research improve our understanding of abusive leadership in schools; (2) what are the practical tools to study abusive educational leadership from a naturalistic perspective? Through qualitative research methods, researchers are likely to explore the complexity of human behavior and thereby generate deeper understanding of leaders' negative behaviors as well as of toxic interactions in the school. In this paper, I emphasize the epistemological contributions of qualitative methodologies to the research on abusive educational leadership and probe into the kind of knowledge we may gain when employing these methodologies.