lethality
Definition
Lethality refers to the annual death toll produced by a violent extremist organization, treated in the research as a primary measure of organizational performance rather than merely an attribute of individual attacks. It reflects both destructive capacity and strategic signaling, in that highly lethal attacks attract publicity, communicate organizational strength, and disseminate an ideological message to audiences well beyond the immediate target. Annual lethality varies within the same organization across a leader's tenure, constrained by countermeasures, shifts in popular support, and fluctuations in organizational resources, which makes multilevel longitudinal analysis the appropriate method for studying it. In a sample of 68 VEO leaders and 645 leader-year observations, lethality escalated over leader tenure, with approximately a 50% increase in expected annual deaths per one-unit step on the log-time scale, and the overall level of lethal output depended on the joint configuration of a leader's influence style and power orientation rather than on either dimension alone.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026)
Related Terms
- leadership (1 shared article)
- terrorism (1 shared article)
- violent extremism (1 shared article)
- multilevel modeling (1 shared article)
Applications
Lethality and Leader Influence Style
Neither charismatic, ideological, nor pragmatic influence style, considered independently, was statistically significantly associated with organizational lethality. The relationship became substantive only when influence style was examined in combination with power orientation: among charismatic leaders, a personalized power orientation was linked to roughly 65.65 predicted annual deaths compared to 5.28 under a socialized orientation, whereas among pragmatic leaders the pattern reversed, with socialized leaders producing the highest lethality of any group.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026)
Lethality and Power Orientation
Personalized and socialized power orientations did not produce uniform differences in lethality across the full sample of VEO leaders. The direction of the effect depended entirely on the leader's influence style, with personalized power producing far deadlier outcomes under charismatic leaders and socialized power producing far deadlier outcomes under pragmatic leaders. This crossover pattern is inconsistent with the assumption that a socialized orientation is generally the safer or less destructive configuration.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026)
Lethality and Leader Tenure
Lethality increased as leader tenure lengthened, indicating that organizational deadliness is not static but accumulates over time within a given leadership period. This rising trajectory was not significantly moderated by influence style or power orientation, suggesting that leadership configuration shapes the overall level of lethal output more than the rate at which that output grows.
Sources: Harms et al. (2026)
