The Leadership Anxiety Effect: How Executive Stress Spreads Through an Organization
Never let them see you sweat.
Unfortunately, your organization can probably tell anyway.
Maybe the CEO starts requesting three updates a day instead of one a week.
A senior leader suddenly wants to approve decisions that managers handled perfectly well six months ago.
Meetings multiply.
Deadlines tighten.
Questions become interrogations.
Someone creates a spreadsheet to track the other spreadsheets.
And before long, everyone is very busy proving that everything is under control.
Except it isn't.
This is the leadership anxiety effect: uncertainty creates anxiety at the top, and when that anxiety isn't recognized and managed, it can influence how leaders communicate, make decisions, delegate authority, and respond to mistakes.
Eventually, what started as an executive's concern can become an organizational behavior.
That matters because leadership anxiety isn't simply a personal wellness issue. It can become an organizational effectiveness issue.
Robert J. Marshak's research on anxiety and organizational change argues that change and anxiety have a "Goldilocks" relationship. Too little anxiety provides little motivation to change. Too much can trigger denial, deflection, defensiveness, and fear. Productive change happens somewhere in between when there is enough tension to stimulate new thinking without overwhelming people's ability to act.
New research suggests that challenge remains highly relevant. A September 2026 MIT Sloan Management Review study describes how unmanaged anxiety can contribute to "defensive organizing" patterns of blame, self-protection, and activity that ultimately preserve the status quo rather than transform it.
In other words:
Stress doesn't always stay with the leader. Sometimes, the organization starts acting it out.
Leadership Anxiety Is Contagious; Even When Nobody Talks About It
Imagine a leadership team navigating declining revenue, restructuring, AI disruption, a merger, or a major organizational transformation.
Nobody walks into Monday's executive meeting and announces:
"Good morning, everyone. I'm deeply uncertain about our future. Coffee?"
Instead, anxiety often appears indirectly.
Leaders seek more certainty.
More reporting.
More approvals.
More meetings.
More control.
Marshak explains that excessive anxiety can trigger unconscious defensive reactions, including fight-or-flight responses, dependency on authority, and other behaviors that replace rational problem-solving. His practical question is particularly useful for leaders:
What feels threatening from this person's or group's perspective, and what would make the situation "safe enough" for them to engage more constructively?
That reframes resistance.
Instead of asking:
"Why won't these people get on board?"
A better leadership question may be:
"What about this change feels threatening, uncertain, unfair, or outside their control?"
That is a very different conversation.
The Five Buttons Organizational Change Loves to Push
Marshak uses David Rock's SCARF framework to explain five psychological needs that organizational change can threaten:
Status. Certainty. Autonomy. Relatedness. Fairness.
A restructuring may threaten status.
An unclear transformation may destroy certainty.
A top-down mandate may reduce autonomy.
A divisive change process may weaken relatedness.
An unexplained promotion, layoff, or resource decision may raise questions about fairness.
The paper explains that when these dimensions are threatened, anxiety and defensive responses can increase; when they are strengthened, they can help reduce perceived threat.
This gives CEOs and HR leaders a practical diagnostic tool.
When resistance appears, don't immediately assume employees are "negative."
Ask:
Which SCARF need is this change threatening?
Sometimes the employee isn't resisting the strategy.
They're resisting the feeling that the strategy leaves them powerless.
The Control Trap: When Anxiety Starts Managing the Organization
One of the most interesting ideas in Marshak's research concerns leadership's relationship with control.
Complex organizations naturally expose leaders to uncertainty. Yet leaders are frequently rewarded for producing answers, making decisions, and appearing confident.
Marshak draws on Edgar Schein's description of a "Do and Tell" culture: leaders gain status by accomplishing things and telling others what to do.
That works reasonably well when the problem has a known solution.
But organizational life rarely sends a polite email saying:
"Hello. I am a straightforward technical problem. Please apply solution B."
Today's challenges are often ambiguous and interconnected.
Marshak argues that when uncertainty threatens leaders' sense of status, certainty, or autonomy, they may respond by searching for guaranteed answers, delaying decisions, denying uncomfortable realities, or increasing control. Yet more planning and control may be precisely the wrong response to complex problems.
A Real-World Scenario
Consider a company undergoing a major transformation.
Performance starts slipping.
The CEO becomes concerned.
To regain control, leadership introduces additional performance reports.
Managers respond by requesting more updates from their teams.
Employees begin spending more time documenting work.
Because everyone is reporting more, meetings increase.
Because meetings increase, employees have less time to perform the work.
Performance slips further.
Leadership becomes more concerned.
And naturally...
someone requests another dashboard.
Nobody intentionally designed this system.
Anxiety did.
Recent MIT Sloan research provides a real-world version of this pattern. Researchers followed a professional-services firm's transformation for four years, conducting nearly 760 hours of observation and more than 300 interviews. They found that anxiety initially helped mobilize change, but unmanaged anxiety eventually contributed to defensive organizing and a failed transformation.
The Anxiety Cascade
This is where executive stress becomes an organizational problem.
Think of it as an anxiety cascade:
Executive uncertainty → increased control → manager anxiety → employee uncertainty → defensive behavior → slower execution → greater executive anxiety.
Congratulations.
The organization has created a feedback loop nobody requested.
And the consequences aren't necessarily dramatic at first.
They may look like:
managers avoiding difficult decisions;
employees waiting for approval;
teams hiding bad news;
leaders micromanaging details;
experimentation slowing down;
meetings becoming increasingly performative;
employees becoming reluctant to challenge senior leaders.
Eventually, everyone starts optimizing for not being wrong instead of discovering what might be right.
That is dangerous during transformation because complex organizational challenges often require experimentation rather than certainty.
Stop Treating Adaptive Challenges Like Technical Problems
Marshak distinguishes between problems with relatively knowable solutions and adaptive challenges that require experimentation, participation, and discovery.
Adaptive challenges may involve multiple parts of the organization, outside stakeholders, competing perspectives, and solutions that cannot simply be commanded into existence.
Culture transformation is adaptive.
Building trust after a merger is adaptive.
Responding to changing employee expectations is adaptive.
Redesigning work around AI is adaptive.
You cannot solve these challenges by sending a memo titled:
"Culture Transformation — FINAL_v7_REALLYFINAL.pdf."
When leaders become anxious, however, they may treat adaptive problems as technical ones because technical solutions create the psychological comfort of control—even when those solutions aren't working. Marshak compares this to looking for lost keys under a streetlight because that's where it's easier to see, rather than searching where the keys were actually lost.
From "Do and Tell" to "Inquire and Learn"
So what should leaders do instead?
Marshak proposes a powerful shift:
From "Do and Tell" leadership to "Inquire and Learn" leadership.
This does not mean executives stop leading and wait for the organization to magically figure itself out.
It means changing what effective leadership looks like.
An "Inquire and Learn" leader creates reflection, brings more voices into important conversations, encourages experimentation, supports promising ideas, and helps new practices become part of everyday organizational life.
The leader's job shifts from:
"I need to have the answer."
to:
"I need to create the conditions in which we can discover the answer."
That isn't weaker leadership.
In complex environments, it may be considerably harder.
Five Ways Leaders Can Stop Anxiety From Running the Organization
1. Name Uncertainty Without Creating Panic
Employees already know when something is happening.
Silence doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It gives uncertainty a creative-writing assignment.
Instead of pretending everything is known, distinguish between:
What we know.What we don't know.What we're deciding.When employees can expect another update.
Clarity doesn't require certainty.
It requires honesty.
2. Diagnose the Threat Before Calling It Resistance
When employees push back against change, examine the SCARF dimensions.
Is the change affecting their status?
Do they lack certainty?
Have they lost autonomy?
Do they distrust another team?
Does the process appear unfair?
Addressing the underlying threat can be more productive than another presentation explaining why everyone should "embrace change."
3. Replace Some Answers With Better Questions
Marshak's discussion of Humble Inquiry is particularly relevant here. Instead of assuming leaders must always provide solutions, leaders can create relationships and environments where new information surfaces through questions.
Try asking:
What are we missing?
What concerns aren't being discussed?
What would we try if we weren't afraid of getting it wrong?
What are employees experiencing that executives aren't seeing?
Your organization's next breakthrough may already exist three levels below the C-suite.
It just hasn't been invited into the meeting yet.
4. Create "Safe Enough" Spaces for Difficult Conversations
Marshak emphasizes the importance of creating environments that provide enough psychological and emotional safety for people to question assumptions, take prudent risks, experiment, and participate in change.
"Safe enough" is important.
Psychological safety does not mean every meeting becomes group therapy.
It means employees can say:
"I think this plan has a problem."
without immediately updating their résumé.
5. Manage Your Anxiety Before It Becomes Everyone's Workflow
Leaders don't need to be emotionless.
They need to become more conscious of how their emotions influence organizational behavior.
Marshak's paper describes the importance of becoming a "non-anxious presence"—providing continuity, authenticity, clear intentions, and reassurance while containing rather than amplifying anxiety.
Recent MIT Sloan research reaches a complementary conclusion. Leaders need the courage to recognize anxiety, curiosity to explore it with others, and care to respond constructively rather than defensively.
Before sending the 11:47 p.m. message demanding a completely new strategy by 8 a.m., ask:
Am I responding to a business problem or trying to relieve my own anxiety?
Your team will appreciate the distinction.
Possibly at 8 a.m.
Why This Matters More in 2026
Leadership pressure isn't theoretical.
Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace data found an interesting paradox: leaders report higher engagement and overall life evaluations than individual contributors, yet they're also considerably more likely to report negative daily emotions. Leaders reported more stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than individual contributors.
Globally, 40% of employees experienced significant stress during the previous day, while the figure was 45% among managers. Gallup also reports that global manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, down nine percentage points from 2022.
This matters because managers don't lead in isolation.
Gallup estimates that managers account for 70% of the variance in their teams' engagement.
So supporting leaders isn't merely an executive wellbeing initiative.
It is an organizational strategy.
The Leadership Question Worth Asking
Organizations frequently ask:
How do we get employees comfortable with change?
Maybe we should ask another question first:
How comfortable are our leaders with uncertainty?
Because employees notice how leaders behave when the answers aren't obvious.
They notice whether leaders become curious or controlling.
Whether bad news is welcomed or punished.
Whether experimentation is encouraged or quietly career-limiting.
Whether uncertainty produces dialogue...
or another spreadsheet.
Marshak's central argument is that organizations cannot rely solely on urgency, rational business cases, or pressure to create adaptive change. Leaders must also recognize and address the anxiety that uncertainty generates.
The goal isn't an anxiety-free organization.
That organization doesn't exist.
The goal is an organization where anxiety becomes information rather than instruction.
Where uncertainty generates inquiry rather than micromanagement.
Where leaders don't have to know everything but know how to help their people navigate what nobody knows yet.
That's not soft leadership.
That's leadership built for complexity.
Ready to Elevate Your Organization?
Organizational transformation requires more than a strategy deck, a new operating model, or another all-hands meeting.
It requires leaders who can navigate uncertainty, create psychological safety, strengthen employee engagement, and help people move through change without allowing anxiety to take control.
At GladED Leadership Solutions, we help organizations develop leaders who communicate with clarity, build trust, strengthen workplace culture, and guide teams confidently through complex change.
Ready to elevate your organization to the next level?
Contact GladED Leadership Solutions today to explore how leadership development and organizational solutions can help your leaders turn uncertainty into learning, engagement, and meaningful progress.
Because your organization will experience uncertainty.
The real question is:
Who's leading whom: you or the anxiety?
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