A decade on from the publication of Decision inertia: Deciding between least worst outcomes in emergency responses to disasters , this commentary reflects on the paper's contribution to understanding decision‐making in high‐stakes environments and its subsequent theoretical, methodological and practical impact. The original paper identified decision inertia as a cognitively active form of indecision, where decision makers in critical incidents get trapped in redundant deliberation rather than committing to a least‐worst course of action. Since its publication, research has advanced understanding of the cognitive, behavioural, affective, social and contextual factors that contribute to decision inertia, while methodological developments have provided increasingly more sophisticated and ecologically valid approaches for studying complex operational settings beyond the practitioner community. However, important questions remain regarding how decision inertia should be measured and how its antecedents and mechanisms can be integrated into a comprehensive multi‐dimensional theoretical model. Moreover, despite advances in the science and recognition in policy, translation into operational practice has been comparatively limited. We argue that greater collaboration and co‐production between researchers and practitioners would ensure that advances in understanding decision inertia lead to meaningful, evidence‐based changes on the ground. Ten years on, there are reasons to be cheerful, but the challenge for the next decade is to translate what we now know into better decision‐making on the ground.
Abstract As socio‐global events more frequently disrupt workplaces, understanding leadership's dynamic and context‐sensitive role in shaping employee wellbeing during periods of uncertainty has become increasingly important. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources Theory, this study synthesized current longitudinal evidence on the association between leadership and mental ill‐health (i.e. stress, burnout, psychological distress). We systematically reviewed 106 longitudinal studies, and meta‐analysed 191 time‐lagged effect sizes, to compare direct leadership associations and the moderating role of workplace disruption. Twenty‐four studies reported a disruptive workplace context, identified by the novelty, criticality or discontinuity of the event. Meta‐analytic results revealed that leadership styles differed in the magnitude of their peak observed association with employee mental ill‐health outcomes. Servant Leadership showed the strongest negative association with burnout across all leadership styles, although evidence was mixed across other outcomes. Destructive/Abusive Leadership styles had consistently strong effects across all mental ill‐health outcomes. Workplace disruption weakened the negative association of Supportive Leadership and stress, but further amplified the positive association between Autocratic Leadership and psychological distress. Statistical analyses and narrative commentary identified key opportunities to improve future longitudinal leadership research. Organizations can leverage these findings to promote sustainable leadership behaviours that enhance mental health generally and through adversity.
Job crafting is widely regarded as a proactive approach for enhancing meaning and well-being at work. This study challenges this view by examining the experiences of 24 change managers across six public-sector organizations. Conceptualizing job crafting as identity work, we show that it unfolds as a cyclical process of identity management, through which individuals repeatedly respond to identity ambiguity, conflict and unvalidated self-worth as roles evolve under conditions of change. We identify three recurring identity tensions and three corresponding cycles of identity-driven job crafting that reflect an emotionally charged process of self-preservation in response to misalignment and shifting expectations. Across cycles, both approach- and avoidance-oriented crafting strategies generate unintended identity consequences that shape subsequent responses and redirect crafting over time. We further identify alternative value definitions as a novel, symbolic form of job crafting through which individuals sustain authenticity when behavioural adjustment proves insufficient. By reconceptualizing aspects of job crafting as a cyclical identity process marked by emotional strain, this study advances understanding of the darker side of job crafting beyond behaviour-centred accounts that portray it as uniformly empowering.
As unobtrusive measures of CEO personality have become more common in organizational research, questions about their validity have grown. Harms et al., Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, (2025) 98, e70052 recently formalized some of these concerns in a meta-analysis, citing higher average intercorrelations and weaker associations with firm performance relative to survey-based measures as evidence of their lack of validity. We argue that these criticisms are overstated, reflecting both a misunderstanding of what unobtrusive measures capture and limitations in the authors' assumptions and meta-analytic approach. Whereas self-report surveys capture executives' self-concepts, existing unobtrusive measures typically assess externally observed or expressed personality. We suggest that relatively higher average intercorrelations are theoretically expected when assessments reflect stylized expressions of CEOs' observed tendencies, and we provide evidence that unobtrusive measures can meaningfully distinguish between traits. We further argue that, given what they represent and their application in large firms, unobtrusive measures likely relate differently to outcomes shaped by external audiences as compared to aggregate financial outcomes. Consistent with this logic, we show substantive differences in the relationships between unobtrusive measures of CEO personality and market performance compared to accounting performance. Our study reaffirms the validity of unobtrusive personality measures and offers guidance for their appropriate evaluation, interpretation and continued refinement.
Integrating moral and ethical considerations into work is often presumed to yield a wide range of beneficial outcomes. Yet these benefits may not be unconditional, as prevailing scholarship has largely overlooked the potential costs associated with self-regulatory resource depletion and diminished self-initiated behaviours that are critical for averting future work disruptions. Drawing on ego depletion theory, we theorize that supervisor's work moralization can inadvertently hinder subordinates' proactive problem prevention by elevating their experiences of ego depletion. Furthermore, we posit that subordinates' reflective moral attentiveness intensifies this relationship, such that highly reflective individuals are more susceptible to the depleting effects of supervisor's work moralization, which in turn exacerbates the reduction in their proactive problem prevention. To test these propositions, we conducted two complementary empirical studies: Study 1, an experience sampling investigation, and Study 2, a vignette-based laboratory experiment. Across both studies, the findings robustly supported our hypotheses. This research advances the literature by challenging the predominantly positive narrative of work moralization, illuminating its paradoxical potential to undermine subordinates' proactive behaviours, and providing novel theoretical insight into the boundary conditions and self-regulatory mechanisms shaping the consequences of moral framing in the workplace.
