Read the research
One article a day, from a real study or a real newsroom, read in full and commented on. Not a roundup. Not a listicle. What I actually think it means for someone leading a real company.
A field quasi-experiment in a multinational firm, published online 22 October 2026 in Strategic Management Journal, found that monetary rewards for network prominence did raise it — and that employees who became more prominent left at higher rates than those who did not.
Read the essay →A survey of 115 senior executives in mainland Chinese firms, published online in Management Decision in August 2026, linked CEO narcissism to more conflict and lower team effectiveness. Team trust did not blunt the first link.
Read the essay →A two-study paper published online in January 2026 found that changes in tasks employees see as unnecessary or unreasonable — decreases included — went with more emotional exhaustion than a steady level did. Bielefeld University put it back in front of managers this month.
Read the essay →A multi-source field study published online in October 2026 in Human Relations found that servant leadership's link to follower performance was moderated by "tough love" — criticism delivered with a positive tone and clear intent to help. The authors hypothesized it would strengthen that link. The results for creativity and turnover intentions were mixed.
Read the essay →A paper in the October 2026 issue of Management Science, covered by Fortune and the University of Iowa earlier this year, finds that public-company CFOs were less likely to leave voluntarily when accounting was delegated beneath them. It covers firms in the S&P 1500, and it shows an association, not a cause.
Read the essay →A cross-sectional survey of 658 employees at 27 Chinese companies, published 28 September 2026 in Frontiers in Psychology, found that cynicism about the organization went with more burnout — and that the link was much weaker where employees rated their relationship with their supervisor highly. Self-reported, one time point, convenience sample.
Read the essay →A cross-sectional survey of 1,178 UK employees, published online in Employee Relations on September 29, 2026, found over half seeing a gap between wellbeing policy and daily behaviour. Perceived alignment in leadership behaviour and in hiring and promotion was strongly associated with seeing the culture as aligned with its stated values.
Read the essay →A paper published January 27, 2026 in the Journal of Strategy and Management, drawing on more than 32,000 observations over 18 years of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, found that 1–5 paid days off a year had little effect on voluntary resignations. Six or more days was associated with a meaningful reduction.
Read the essay →A paper published online in August 2026 and covered this month links the ratio of partners and managers to staff in 20 large U.S. audit firms to fewer misstatements. It is an association, and it comes from auditing, not from your industry.
Read the essay →A Sungkyunkwan University team surveyed 42 team leaders and 282 employees at two time points during a company-wide restructuring, in a paper in the Journal of Business Research, volume 216, 2026. The finding worth your attention: leader commitment spread to teams, and ethical leadership strengthened the effect.
Read the essay →A Journal of Applied Psychology paper, first published online in May 2026 and surfaced by PsyPost on October 10, followed 826 people in 140 work groups. Higher cognitive ability came with more peer-rated hostility and less help for women, and not for men.
Read the essay →A survey of 311 full-time employees, in a paper dated 8 October 2026, links supervisors' developmental feedback to less work procrastination — and the two mechanisms the authors tested are about what the feedback does to the person's head.
Read the essay →A survey of 1,164 Chinese family-firm founders, published October 1, 2026 in the Journal of Family Business Management, rated relationship management and resource integration highest in a successor. Founders with greater family ownership rated relationship management higher and imitation and innovation lower.
Read the essay →A spring 2026 Syracuse University survey of 112 independent local news operators found 77.3% of those with 100 to 500 paying subscribers naming burnout and sustainability as a top challenge, the peak of any group. It is a small, self-selected sample from one industry, but the shape of the finding travels.
Read the essay →A paper published in September 2026 drew on follower ratings of 115 early-career managers in one multinational and found their followers' well-being carried the link to engagement and learning. Correlational, and I could read only the abstract.
Read the essay →A national survey of 2,009 U.S. workers, released by the American Psychological Association on September 23, 2026, found that employees low on “psychological capital” — hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism — were more than twice as likely to say they intend to look for a new job in the next year. The figures are self-reported and correlational, not proof that one causes the other.
Read the essay →A role-playing experiment out of Cornell, UT Austin and Emory, published September 20, 2026 in the Journal of Accounting Research, found that whether a training slot given to your best or worst performer reads as fair to the team depends on norms already baked into how work gets assigned there — not on the merits of the decision itself.
Read the essay →A two-study analysis in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that blame for a coworker's offense can migrate to the supervisor — more so when the victim sees the coworker as acting on the supervisor's authority and holds lower status relative to the supervisor than to the coworker.
Read the essay →A Journal of Management study of two field samples — 261 older employees and 274 employee-supervisor pairs, published September 21, 2026 — finds that when older employees see themselves as overqualified, the reaction is often not disengagement but a wish to guide the next generation, especially where the company has practices built for older workers.
Read the essay →A new three-study project out of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou Normal University, and Zhejiang Gongshang University — published online September 9 — finds that habitually running cost-benefit math on situations makes people more willing to loosen their own morals. It isn't a leadership study, but the mechanism it isolates is one every leader will recognize from the inside.
Read the essay →A Harvard Business School field experiment split one company's ownership letters two ways — values language versus specific behaviors — and only one version kept people through a hurricane.
Read the essay →A nine-week study of 308 U.S. workers found that a heavier week of politics they personally read as negative tracked with more anxiety and less engagement on the job that same week, while a heavier week of politics they read as positive tracked with more hope, more engagement, and more willingness to help a coworker. The paper runs in the December 2026 issue of Computers in Human Behavior; Texas A&M publicized it on September 16.
Read the essay →A study published September 15, 2026 in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology mapped workplace culture as a web of connected behaviors instead of a scorecard of separate traits, and found that in the organizations tested, one specific manager behavior did more to drive how the whole place felt than any other. The authors also tested, and did not confirm, the common assumption that your longest-tenured people are simply the most locked in.
Read the essay →A field study and an experiment published September 3, 2026 in the Journal of Applied Psychology find that supervisors who mention their own role in doing right by an employee can either lift the team or repel it — and the difference is whether anyone else gets named in the story.
Read the essay →A May 2026 analysis pooling 62 meta-analyses backs the case for hiring on emotional intelligence — and names, in its own abstract, the exact condition under which that evidence gets weaker.
Read the essay →A study of Ukrainian employees surveyed during a pandemic and an ongoing hybrid conflict found that a supervisor's character reached engagement, wellbeing, commitment, and turnover intention only by first passing through one narrow measure: how satisfied the employee was with that supervisor specifically.
Read the essay →A preregistered lab experiment, validated against real store sales, found that people who self-select into management roles perform worse than managers chosen at random — and that the eagerness itself is part of the problem.
Read the essay →A new meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology finds all four types of team conflict, task conflict included, run negative with team performance. If you've been treating your team's arguments as a sign things are working, this is worth a second look.
Read the essay →A small qualitative study of Korean family firms finds incumbents and successors telling two different stories about how trust between them formed — one built, one inherited. The gap between those stories, not the transition plan itself, is what the study surfaces.
Read the essay →A new study on workplace knowledge hiding traces it to something more fixable than distrust: how a leader listens. A four-week training experiment on 720 people found the effect is larger when both leaders and employees learn it, not the boss alone.
Read the essay →A daily-diary study of 176 working adults finds that expecting people to be reachable after hours produces more off-hour interruptions, and those interruptions produce exhaustion at work — with longer sleep across the week weakening the whole chain.
Read the essay →A new experiment on AI-generated rejection letters finds that a few sentences of explanation change how people see your company — and the version most hiring tools ship by default skips them.
Read the essay →A vignette study out of Hungary found that disclosing AI involvement in performance feedback made employees react worse on eight of nine measures, even when the sentences themselves never changed. For a leader whose name is the only signature on most feedback in the building, that is not a wording problem.
Read the essay →A meta-analysis of 145 workplace studies finds that how someone communicates outweighs what they've actually done in shaping first impressions — and that those impressions still track how a person is regarded more than a month later.
Read the essay →A new study of more than 3,400 Japanese managers and employees finds that trust erodes less from what people do and more from how their counterpart interprets it — with real implications for any leader who reads one missed report as a pattern.
Read the essay →A Harvard Business School field experiment found that attaching a written rationale to an AI's rejection call made evaluators defer to it instead of verify it — and nearly doubled the rate at which good proposals were wrongly killed, compared to a bare recommendation alone.
Read the essay →A Journal of Management study on star employees and aging finds that a veteran's real value can shift from what they produce to what they cause other people to produce — and most performance reviews aren't built to see the difference.
Read the essay →A new sociology study on family estrangement was never about companies. But the mechanism it names — loyalty enforced instead of earned — is the one quietly running your succession plan.
Read the essay →A study of 7,704 employees at one healthcare system found remote workers report the highest well-being — and that well-being, not location itself, is what predicts who eventually leaves. For a leader weighing a mandate, that changes what you're actually deciding.
Read the essay →A new finance study finds that overconfident CEOs quietly cut the safeguards that protect against political and regulatory risk — and cut them hardest exactly when the risk is highest.
Read the essay →A controlled experiment on managers and performance feedback found that a quarter of them withhold it even when it's good news, and that negative results get softened for women almost twice as often as for men. The pattern says less about the employee than about the manager deciding for them.
Read the essay →A University of Queensland study paired heart-rate monitors with hourly surveys and found most people spend the workday doing nothing deliberate to manage their energy. The pattern that actually worked wasn't rest or grinding through — it was both at once.
Read the essay →A peer-reviewed study of hiring events in college football and Big Law finds that bringing a team along helps the newcomers stay — and measurably speeds the exit of the people already in the room, especially when the incoming group already has a boss.
Read the essay →A new study on gratitude in the workplace found that when a leader says thanks, the habit doesn't stop with the person who heard it — it moves down the org chart on its own. What a leader models at the top is what a report three levels down learns to notice.
Read the essay →A peer-reviewed study of nearly 30,000 workers in Europe and the U.S. found manager quality predicts work intensity better than job title does, and the effect is strongest in small, private, non-union workplaces — the kind most leaders in this room actually run.
Read the essay →A new survey finds most CEOs think their managers handle hard conversations with confidence — while nearly half of managers admit they've fed an employee's name and performance details into a public AI tool to figure out what to say.
Read the essay →A new PNAS study on negotiation and social class has a lesson buried in it for anyone who fields a raise request: the ask isn't the risk. Your reaction to it is.
Read the essay →A new peer-reviewed study out of Carnegie Mellon found that how people express disagreement at work matters more than what the disagreement is about. For the person at the top, that reaction happens in real time in front of everyone, and it gets copied.
Read the essay →A new survey of 607 CEOs and managers finds executives rate their managers' confidence far above what managers report about their own preparedness — and the hard conversations that fail most often fail on delivery, not content.
Read the essay →New research on the biology of decision-making under pressure says the real damage isn't a wrong answer. It's how many right answers quietly disappear from view.
Read the essay →