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Previous work has focused on the role of constructive leadership styles for employee work engagement and exhaustion. We contribute to this literature by investigating the effects on ethical leadership. Moreover, as for many psychological phenomena bad is stronger than good, we examine the relationship of unethical leader behavior, such as perceived toxic leadership, on engagement and exhaustion, highlighting the role of leader-member exchange (LMX) as an underlying process as well as employees’ need for autonomy as a potential boundary condition. For this purpose, we surveyed 311 employees in different professions and tested our model using path analyses in Mplus. As hypothesized, we found that ethical leadership was positively related to work engagement and negatively related to exhaustion, whereas the opposite was the case for toxic leadership. In both cases, these relationships were mediated …