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Organizational analysis reveals how unmanaged anxiety triggers defensive organizing during corporate transformations, highlighting the necessity of active leadership emotion regulation.
Successful change initiatives are often aided by collective organizational anxiety as the need to address a burning platform rallies employees to the cause. But when leaders fail to manage both their own and others’ emotions and worries, that anxiety can trigger “defensive organizing,” in which the transformation initiative itself stalls as managers and employees engage in finger-pointing while the status quo persists. Research points to ways that leaders can do better.
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Fitzsimons et al. (2026) studied this question.
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