Although leader wellbeing is increasingly recognized as being essential to organizational health, much research and workplace initiatives tend to focus on employee health (e.g., Arnold & Connelly, 2013), overlooking the unique stressors and wellbeing needs of those in leadership roles. Leaders are often expected to maintain composure, project strength, and provide support—while receiving little support themselves. These expectations can create a sense that their own wellbeing is secondary to that of their teams, a perception reinforced by organizational norms (e.g., "tough it out" cultures), internalized values, and gendered expectations for emotional regulation and invulnerability (cf., Offermann & Foley, 2020). Therefore, leader self-care among may be a function of both personal discipline and knowledge, as well as complex identity dynamics, perceived role obligations, and the subtle (or sometimes explicit) signals they receive from their organizations.
To address these issues, we explore how organizational norms and individual values influence leaders' self-care behaviours and wellbeing. Qualitative interviews with leaders from diverse sectors examine common barriers to self-care, including norms, pressures to model positivity, and personal leadership values and beliefs (e.g., 'my team comes first'; 'I don't want to burden others'). These insights inform a quantitative study of 150 leaders across industries (via Prolific), examining the relationships among self-care behaviours, values, workplace norms, gender, and wellbeing.
This work advances recent calls to reframe leader health not as an individual trait but as a systemic outcome, embedded in relational and contextual dynamics (e.g., Kaluza et al., 2021). Interventions aiming to foster psychologically healthy workplaces must include leaders as a focus— not only as supporters of others' self-care and wellbeing, but also as individuals with legitimate and often overlooked health needs