Leadership in Times of Crisis: we live in a context that puts extra weight on people and on companies. The political and economic crisis changes the rules from one month to the next: rising costs, unpredictable demand, fiscal and legislative uncertainty. On top of the usual tension of doing business, this adds one more layer — exactly the kind of pressure that brings to the surface how each person and each organization truly functions.
Picture a concrete situation: a B2B contract spinning out of control, with significant penalties on the table. The reactions of two managers in the same company say a great deal about its organizational culture. The head of the legal department, with an anxious pattern, goes into high alert and starts looking for someone to blame: he demands that communication with the client be cut off and that everything move to official notices — a “paper attack,” designed above all to protect his department. The head of sales, with a secure pattern, takes responsibility, defuses the situation, and proposes a commercial solution: quickly delivering a partial version and a friendly renegotiation, to save the partnership. The same crisis, the same company — two opposite patterns, two “micro-cultures” in action.
What separates the two is not competence, but how each of them manages trust, control, and threat under pressure. Because over time, a company comes to resemble the people who make its decisions — not just the CEO, but every person who holds decision-making power. And one of the most powerful and least-discussed forces behind this phenomenon has a name: attachment style.
What attachment styles actually are
The concept comes from the psychology of relationships and reached a wide audience through books such as Attached (Levine & Heller, 2010). The basic idea is simple: each of us forms, early in life, a pattern for managing closeness, trust, and threat. That pattern doesn’t stay in our personal life — it follows us into the meeting room and into our decisions.
Research describes three orientations, recognizable through behavior rather than clinical labels. The secure style involves comfort with both closeness and autonomy: a person who regulates emotion effectively and starts from the assumption that others are trustworthy. The anxious style involves vigilance toward rejection or loss, a need for validation, and a tendency to control out of fear. The avoidant style is characterized by discomfort with dependence and closeness: distance, self-sufficiency, and an emphasis on the task at the expense of the relationship.
It’s worth underscoring from the start: these are dimensions, not verdicts. No style makes you a “good” or “bad” leader. But each comes with automatic patterns — and at the top, these patterns don’t stay private. They become policies, contracts, meetings, and evaluation criteria. They become culture.
How attachment enters business: through the leader and through every department manager
Inside an organization, the leader becomes for the team a source of safety or of threat — what we psychologists call an “attachment figure.” Davidovitz et al. (2007), studying units under real stress, showed that the attachment style of the person in charge predicts both performance and the well-being of those they lead. This mechanism connects to one of the classic theories of management, “upper echelons” (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), according to which the organization ends up reflecting the characteristics of those who run it.
Here a nuance appears that is essential for anyone in top management: influence doesn’t flow only top-down. The CEO sets the strategic direction, but every department manager imprints their own style onto the area they lead. A procurement manager with an anxious pattern can build a culture of excessive control even under a CEO with a secure style. Patterns propagate in every direction — top-down, laterally between peers at the same level, and even bottom-up, through the pressure managers exert on the board. The relevant question is not just “what style does the CEO have?” but “what style does each decision-maker have — and what do they leave behind in the organization?”
The imprint inside the team
The mechanism by which style becomes culture has a name: psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999) — the degree to which people feel they can speak up, make mistakes, and take risks without being punished. A predictable, available leader builds psychological safety; an unpredictable or distant one erodes it. The link runs through trust: the effect of attachment style on employee outcomes is mediated by the level of trust in the person leading them (Harms et al., 2016; Simmons et al., 2009). In business terms, this dynamic shows up directly in indicators such as team performance, retention, decision quality, and the capacity to innovate.
An example from my own practice makes the idea more concrete. I worked with some of the managers of an organization (at their own initiative), led by a leader with a predominantly avoidant style — manifested not through quiet withdrawal, but through a constant need to position himself above everyone else. He humiliated his managers in meetings, publicly corrected every proposal they made, and gradually turned them into mere executors who did exactly what they were told, without bringing anything of their own. Initiative had become risky, so initiative disappeared. The business effects were visible: slower decisions, missed opportunities, and a growing dependence on the leader for every critical step.
His conviction was that “fear breeds respect.” In reality, what he took for respect was inhibition — and here the science is very precise. Under fear, the brain switches into threat mode: prefrontal cortex activity drops rapidly, and the brain orients toward faster, more reactive responses, driven by emotional circuits such as the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for judgment, working memory, and initiative — is, in effect, taken “offline” (Arnsten, 2009). Fear doesn’t produce respect, but inhibition: it blocks exactly the thinking brain the company needs and leaves submission and paralysis in its place. What the leader was reading as loyalty was, in fact, a team with its prefrontal cortex disconnected.
How it shows up in departments: procurement, sales, legal, finance
The real “aha” for a decision-maker comes when they realize that the same pattern propagates into every operational corner of the firm. It’s worth pausing here, because no matter which department you lead, you are very likely to recognize yourself in these dynamics.
Procurement. Negotiation, by its very nature, activates attachment: it involves interdependence, control over resources, and risk of loss (Bear & Segel-Karpas, 2017). Under a control reflex, the relationship with suppliers becomes a field for domination. I have seen procurement departments build unrealistic scenarios: “We’ll sign for three years, but in order to tick the box of being a ‘reliable’ supplier, you should also acquire and expand the adjacent facility and increase your capacity — and we reserve the right to replace you at the end of the three years.” The asymmetry is total: you ask the partner to take on a major investment risk without offering equivalent commitments. In the short term, it looks like strength. In the long term, however, you turn the supplier into an obedient partner — one who didn’t choose the collaboration but was left without alternatives. And a supplier focused on survival no longer innovates: improvements, ideas, and optimizations disappear. You bought compliance and paid for it with the partner’s intelligence. The contrast is well documented — companies that treat their suppliers as long-term partners achieve superior results compared to those that keep them under pressure (Liker & Choi, 2004).
Sales. The same axis, a different manifestation. A sales manager with an anxious style overpromises beyond delivery capacity, depends on the client’s approval, and goes into alert at the first objection — passing their own unease on to the team. A manager with an avoidant style stays strictly transactional: hunting the signature as an event, then pulling away. The secure style cultivates long-term relationships — exactly the ones that, over time, sustain retention and competitive advantage (Morgan & Hunt, 1994).
Legal. The contract is often the leader’s fear translated into clauses. A culture of control or distrust produces defensive, punitive contracts, designed to defend against a presumed adversary instead of building alignment and real trust between partners (Frydlinger, Hart & Vitasek, 2019). A head of legal with an avoidant pattern is easy to recognize in behavior: they respond slowly and tersely, avoid direct interactions with the partner, move everything into documents and clauses, and prefer to “cover the risk” rather than resolve the relationship — and this distance gradually becomes organizational policy. A manager with a secure style uses the contract as an instrument of collaboration and alignment, not as a shield against a presumed adversary.
Finance. Here the pattern shows up in reporting and budget control. The anxious pattern turns the numbers into an instrument of punishment and catastrophizing — every deviation becomes a crisis, every budget meeting an interrogation; the budget is no longer a compass but a constraint, like a set of handcuffs. The avoidant pattern produces opacity: financial information is withheld, decisions are made behind closed doors, and teams are left to guess. The secure style uses financial transparency as a common basis for decisions, not as a lever of power.
No matter where you recognized yourself, the idea is the same: departments don’t just execute policies. They execute a psychology — sometimes the CEO’s, sometimes their own managers’. In practice, procedures are the organization’s skeleton, while the leader’s personality is the nervous system that determines how the company reacts to stress.
Crisis: when attachment style becomes strategy
In good times, organizational culture tolerates the leader’s style. In a crisis, attachment style becomes strategy. And here it’s important to say it explicitly, to avoid misinterpretation: a crisis doesn’t create a person’s patterns, it only brings them to the surface. Under extreme pressure, we revert to our baseline pattern — a universal human reaction, not a personal flaw. The difference is that, at the top, this pattern multiplies rapidly across thousands of decisions.
Two forces act simultaneously. At the individual level, threat activates the attachment system (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007): the secure style stays flexible and communicative, the anxious style tends to seize control and escalate, and the avoidant style reduces communication and withdraws. At the organizational level, threat rigidifies the system — it centralizes authority and decision-making, restricts the flow of information, and silences precisely the voices that could flag risks or solutions (Staw, Sandelands & Dutton, 1981).
The two dynamics amplify each other. When the organization naturally rigidifies under pressure, a leader with an avoidant pattern is no longer counterbalanced — on the contrary, the system validates their reactions: centralization looks like “discipline,” silence looks like “prudence,” and harshness looks like “firmness.” So instead of being corrected by reality, the leader’s pattern becomes the organization’s unwritten rule. Culture doesn’t correct the pattern in a crisis — it turns it into a rule.
We see it in four concrete areas. In communication, where the secure leader practices calm transparency — saying what they know, what they don’t know, and what they’re doing, reducing uncertainty and increasing trust (Men et al., 2024). By contrast, the silence of the avoidant pattern leaves a vacuum that the team fills with the most pessimistic scenarios, while the anxious pattern — oscillating between catastrophe and optimism — transmits its own unease throughout the organization, until people no longer react to reality, but to the leader’s state.
In decisions, where the secure style maintains delegation, while the avoidant and anxious patterns tend to centralize — out of distrust or out of fear. In departmental reactions, where cash pressure can turn procurement into a mechanism for pressuring suppliers, and the legal function into a generator of defensive clauses. And in people, where the way layoffs are handled directly influences the behavior of those who remain: a process perceived as unfair erodes trust and productivity, while one that is fair and transparent protects them (Brockner, 1992).
Two patterns, the same crisis
Last fall, after losing some clients and projects, two Romanian software companies of similar size had to cut costs by roughly 20% over a short period.
In the first (a leader with an anxious-avoidant pattern), the CEO withdrew for two weeks, then — as rumors intensified — centralized the decision and announced the layoffs through emails sent on Friday evenings. Costs dropped on paper, but within just three months, 15% of those who remained left: precisely the key people, the most sought-after on the market.
In the second (a leader with earned secure style), the CEO immediately called a meeting with the entire organization: he explained the situation openly, delegated the mapping of competencies to his managers, and handled the layoffs through individual conversations, with fair packages and support for reskilling. The productivity of those who stayed rose by 12% the following quarter, and the crisis became a catalyst for loyalty. The same pressure, two patterns — two opposite outcomes. And the difference comes not only from context, but from how a leader uses — or leaves unchecked — their own attachment style.
The good news: security can be trained
If the article stopped here, it would be an indictment. It isn’t. One important but often underestimated capacity in a crisis is attachment security, which can be acquired. In the specialized literature, this process is described as earned security: attachment patterns formed early in life are not fixed and can become more secure through awareness, reflection, and corrective relationships. In an organizational context, a leader with more secure attachment can better support flexibility, transparency, and connection during periods of stress, functioning as a source of safety for the team.
What’s more, a leader with earned security is often the most valuable in the organization: they have lived through panic and the fear of failure firsthand, but learned to regulate them. Unlike someone who has never been tested, they recognize a crisis immediately — and consciously choose to respond with calm rather than defensiveness.
This leaves every person in top management with an honest question, whether they’re a CEO or a department head: how much of “this is how we do things” is real strategy — and how much is my own pattern, scaled to the level of the company, especially when I’m under pressure? And, for a CEO, one more question: what behavioral signs should I be watching for in the people around me — in how procurement treats suppliers, in how the legal department writes contracts, in how each manager reacts when things get hard?
Because, in the end, the real competitive advantage in a crisis is not just strategy. It is the capacity of the people who decide not to fall into the pattern of fear, control, and isolation. And that pattern, once seen, can be changed.
Ph.D. Claudia Indreica is an organizational psychologist and founder of Psihoselect, with over 25 years of practice in psychological profiling and people-decisions for top- and middle-management positions. Specialised in Assessment Centres for managers, she applies a scientifically validated methodology for organizational contexts — in selection, promotion, leadership development, team interventions, and executive search — for companies in Romania and international subsidiaries, across automotive, IT, manufacturing, financial services, retail, and pharma.
She has a solid academic background — a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in organizational psychology at Babeș-Bolyai University — and combines scientific research with managerial practice to build recruitment, profiling, and organizational-development solutions.
Beyond Psihoselect, she actively contributes to Romania’s business ecosystem and public debate: Leader of the Labour Market Task Force at Romanian Business Leaders; Board member of DWNT (an organization that represents, at regional level, German and affiliated companies, supporting collaboration between the German and Romanian business environments); and a constant presence at the Râșnov Film and History Festival (FFIR), where she coordinates the debates component on important, strategic topics from Romanian reality, also serving as moderator and speaker.
She is an active author — writing analyses on the labour market, economic transformations, and the challenges of the European business environment on Economedia, Substack, and LinkedIn — and a keynote speaker at business conferences.
