Power and Influence: A Media Analysis of Toxic Leadership in Michael Scott & Jordan Belfort

For our SACAD presentation, we were given the task of looking at and analyzing two toxic leaders from various types of media, this could be from books, movies, television shows, or video games. The purpose of this was to look at the various traits these people have that make them classified as toxic leaders. For our examples, we chose to analyze Jordan Belfort, specifically from the movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street”(M. Scorsese, 2013). As well as Michael Scott from “The Office”(A. Greene, 2005). The theme that connects these two is as simple as being business people, they are each the bosses of their respective environment and we wanted to look at their leadership style in respect to both their work lives and business lives.