Why does my leadership team never disagree with me?

Across two experiments and a field study of leader-member pairs, employees who perceived their leader as keeping work-related secrets reported lower discretionary behaviour towards that leader, including organisational citizenship behaviour and voice. This pattern operated through a sense that the leader had violated an implicit psychological contract with them. The effect was more pronounced among employees with a low propensity to trust others.

The study, titled ‘Being Left in the Dark: Leader Work-Related Secrecy, Psychological Contract Violation, and Employee Discretionary Behavior’, appeared in the Journal of Organizational Behavior on 5 September 2026. It drew on Study 1 (N = 287), Study 2 (N = 177) and Study 3, a multisource multiwave field survey of 364 leader-member dyads.

Source: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2026-09-05.

A survey found that people in business units dominated by what the authors term coerced allegiance were statistically more likely to agree that “agreeing with powerful others is the best alternative” and that it is “safer to agree with managers than to say what you really think.” Confidence in speaking up was reported as lowest across the social exchange types identified, including in units marked by sycophantic allegiance, where people default to telling those with power what they think they want to hear. Adaptive performance, measured as the ability to deal with unpredictable situations and adjust to change, was also lowest under coerced allegiance.

The findings were published by MIT Sloan Management Review on 1 September 2026, in an article by Ron Carucci and Jim Detert titled “Dethroning Loyalty,” drawing on a survey the authors conducted across workplace units.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-09-01.

A four-year study of a professional services firm’s leadership team, based on nearly 760 hours of observation and more than 300 interviews, found that when performance faltered, executives acknowledged their worries privately but not to one another, and their team did not challenge the resulting strategic vision. At a retreat, no one questioned the chief executive’s diagnosis or asked what a shared leadership model would mean in practice; project teams that later surfaced unwelcome data were blamed rather than heard, and the firm was eventually acquired.

The findings were published by MIT Sloan Management Review in its Fall 2026 issue, in an article by Declan Fitzsimons, Gianpiero Petriglieri and Jennifer Petriglieri dated 1 September 2026.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-09-01.

In an interview, Dan Schulman, now chief executive of Verizon after previously leading PayPal, described the telecoms group as hierarchical and risk averse, with staff more inclined to show their work than surface disagreement. He said the organisation had for years been “willing to be prey,” conceding market share rather than contesting it, and that the push for change came from the top rather than dissent rising up from teams. Schulman said he laid off 13,000 staff in his second month in the role, redirecting savings toward customer-facing investment, and that he addressed staff directly in unscripted all-hands meetings to counter a culture he described as reluctant to challenge leadership or take risks. The account was published by Harvard Business Review on 4 August 2026, as part of its HBR IdeaCast podcast series.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2026-08-04.

Interviews with more than 25 board and committee chairs and 20 nonchair board members found a gap in perception: chairs largely believed they led boards where diverse voices were heard and welcomed, but many nonchair members did not share that view. Men were more likely than women to say they could bring their full selves to the boardroom. The pattern matched results from a separate global survey of board directors, in which most chairs reported inclusive practice while a smaller share of directors agreed their boards were actually inclusive.

The findings were published by MIT Sloan Management Review on 19 August 2026, in an article by Jennifer Jordan and N. Anand titled “The Five Inclusive Behaviors Board Chairs Overlook.”

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-08-19.

Leaders who prioritise making people feel comfortable, rather than raising hard truths, can weaken their organisations’ performance, according to two HBR contributors. They argue that leaders who push past a fear of upsetting or disappointing colleagues, and instead focus on results and accountability, are better placed to sustain their organisations’ success. The piece frames this as a shift from being merely liked to being effective, with harmony-seeking behaviour cited as a barrier to necessary conversations and decisions.

The analysis was published by Harvard Business Review on 19 August 2026, written by Ron Ashkenas, a partner emeritus at Schaffer Consulting, and Gali Cooks, president and CEO of Leading Edge.

Source: Harvard Business Review, 2026-08-19.

Four studies spanning short-story writing, circular-economy problem-solving, humour captioning and collaborative storytelling found that AI assistance raised the quality of individual creative output while narrowing the range of ideas produced across groups. Gains were largest for people with lower starting creativity, yet across all studies the collective pool of ideas became more similar when AI was used. The point in a workflow where AI entered mattered: applying it during idea generation reduced variety, whereas restricting it to idea selection kept diversity closer to levels seen in human-only work. Léonard Boussioux, Anil Doshi, Oliver Hauser and Kartik Hosanagar reported these findings in MIT Sloan Management Review on 9 July 2026, in an article examining how AI-assisted creativity affects organisations’ capacity for varied, breakthrough thinking over time.

Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-07-09.