Setting the tone: The effect of leaders' mental health disclosure on follower perceptions and intentions

Amid rising global mental health challenges among employees and leaders, this research examines how leader mental health disclosure—sharing sensitive information about a mental health condition—shapes followers' perceptions of the leader and the quality of their relationship. Across two vignette‐based experiments involving more than 1500 employees, we find that leaders who self‐disclose a mental health condition are perceived as more moral, though not more sociable, and elicit greater psychological safety and greater follower willingness to self‐disclose about their own mental health. These effects extend in an attenuated form to less personal disclosures about a close other's mental health challenge. Despite mental health stigma and prototypical leader expectations of strength and competence, self‐disclosure did not diminish perceived leader competence or sociability, except in the case of alcohol addiction (in Study 2). Exploratory analyses reveal that these findings are consistent across men and women leaders and followers. This research frames leaders' mental health disclosure as a health‐oriented leadership behavior with direct reputational implications and demonstrates that such leader openness can foster psychological safety, reduce barriers to help‐seeking, and thus contribute to destigmatizing mental health in organizational settings.