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Research Article | Special Issue: Psychology of Violent Extremism

Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations

Mackenzie Harms ORCID, Alex Bruens ORCID, Justin Jones ORCID, & Gina Ligon
https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00069
Published: August 3, 2026
Copyright: The authors (CC BY 4.0)

Harms, M., Bruens, A., Jones, J., & Ligon, G. (2026). Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations. advances.in/psychology, 1, e165880. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00069

Harms, Mackenzie, et al. "Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations." advances.in/psychology, vol. 1, no. 1, 2026, e165880. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00069.

Harms, Mackenzie, Alex Bruens, Justin Jones, and Gina Ligon. 2026. "Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations." advances.in/psychology 1 (1): e165880. https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00069.

Harms M, Bruens A, Jones J, Ligon G. Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations. advances.in/psychology. 2026;1(1):e165880. doi:10.56296/aip00069.

Harms, M. et al. (2026) 'Deadly persuasion: A multilevel analysis of leader influence tactics and lethality in violent extremist organizations', advances.in/psychology, 1(1), e165880. Available at: https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00069.

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Research on violent extremist organizations (VEOs) has largely treated lethality as a feature of individual attacks or as an aggregate organizational outcome, leaving an open question as to how lethal performance changes across a leader’s tenure. The multilevel methods needed to examine that question remain uncommon in the study of VEOs. We address this gap by applying two models of outstanding organizational leadership—charismatic-ideological-pragmatic influence and personalized-versus-socialized power orientation—to a sample of 68 VEO leaders and 645 leader-year observations. Using a multilevel longitudinal analysis, we examine whether leaders’ influence tactics and power orientations explain changes in lethal performance of the organization over the course of their tenure. Results indicate that lethality increased as leader tenure lengthened, but neither influence style nor power orientation independently accounted for lethality. Instead, the two operated jointly: among charismatic leaders, those with a personalized power orientation led far deadlier organizations than those with a socialized orientation, whereas among pragmatic leaders the pattern reversed. Thus, neither power orientation was uniformly more dangerous; the outcomes driven by those styles depended on the influence style of the leader. These findings suggest that VEOs may represent an uncommon context in which personalized leadership can outperform the socialized orientation typically associated with effective organizational leadership, but only under certain influence conditions. The results also point to the value of incorporating leadership theories into assessments of VEO threat and leadership-decapitation strategies, and underscore the value in applying advanced statistical modeling to gain better insight into VEO behavior.

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