Originally published in Romanian by Economedia on 9 October 2026.
Before a bridge is opened to traffic, it is loaded to its limit. Engineers do not do this to bring it down, but to test the structure: where it gives way, where it holds, and which cracks were already there.
Romania’s economy is now going through exactly this kind of stress test. In February 2026, the National Institute of Statistics confirmed that the country had entered a technical recession, and BCR’s macroeconomic forecasts point to a real GDP contraction of around 0.7% in 2026 (in Romanian). Against this tense backdrop, I recently discussed on Harta de impact (G4Media & Economedia, in Romanian) how Romanian companies are experiencing this period.
Drawing on 25 years of working with leaders, managers and teams, I believe a crisis does more than create new problems in organizations. It makes the old ones more visible and accelerates them. The critical question for any board is not whether cracks will appear, but what it does about them: step in early to reinforce the structure, or keep adding pressure until it gives way.
Here are six acute symptoms we are seeing in organizations right now, and the mechanisms that actually explain each of them.
Part I. What pressure reveals
1. Decisions concentrate at the top, information arrives filtered
The management meeting runs for three hours. Budgets are frozen “until further notice”, any purchase above a modest threshold needs the CEO’s signature, and directors arrive with polished presentations instead of real questions.
When it feels threatened, an organization tends to do exactly the opposite of what would help it: instead of listening to more perspectives, it concentrates control in a few hands and retreats into the solutions it already knows, even when the situation is entirely new — a pattern I analysed in my article on leadership in times of crisis. Recent research confirms this pattern at every level — individuals, teams and companies (DeBode et al., 2025). In practice: just as challenges become more complex, decisions reach ever fewer people, guided by ever less real information from the ground.
2. The stuck manager and the team that asks approval for everything
An operations director receives a firm mandate from shareholders to cut costs by 15%, while the managers reporting to him say their people are at the end of their tether. He does not decide. He asks for another analysis, then another report. Meanwhile, the team starts asking “please confirm” for routine procedures it handled on its own a year ago.
The blockage is not always about competence, but about psychological maturity. Sometimes it shows how hard it is for a manager to weigh contradictory demands and decide without everyone’s approval. Robert Kegan, professor at Harvard University, describes, among other things, three ways of organizing thinking that are relevant to adult life and leadership:
- Thinking shaped by others’ expectations (The Socialized Mind): The individual’s identity is defined by the expectations of others (team, superiors, group norms). When two expectations collide, the person freezes: any choice means disappointing someone. This way of thinking makes loyalty, commitment and genuine cooperation possible; its limit is the difficulty of independently assessing the group’s expectations.
- Thinking guided by one’s own compass (The Self-Authoring Mind): The person has developed an internal value system and their own filter of judgement. They listen to external demands but pass them through their own code of principles, and are able to support and implement unpopular decisions.
- Thinking able to revise its own compass (The Self-Transforming Mind): The individual understands that their own value system is only a partial perspective. They move beyond binary logic (“I am right, the others are wrong”) and can navigate paradox, contradiction and complexity without becoming defensive.
In Kegan’s research, more than half of adults (around 58%) are still at the first level or in the fragile transition to the second: they act more in search of external validation than anchored in principles of their own.
And this maturity is not the same as IQ. They are two different dimensions, only weakly related: you can be intellectually brilliant and, at the same time, emotionally dependent on the approval of others (Cohn & Westenberg, 2004). In practice, a brilliant person can be completely overwhelmed when their role suddenly becomes more complex.
In my practice, I often see the direct consequence of this gap: an autonomous leader (Self-Authoring Mind) leads a team used only to carrying out instructions from above. He expects initiative and is frustrated that people “don’t think for themselves”. The team, in turn, feels lost without strict procedures and experiences every decision as a huge risk of getting it wrong. The problem is not a lack of effort — everyone is working flat out. The problem is that the team is being asked for a leap in maturity of thinking it is not yet ready for, and the pressure of the context turns this gap into a constant source of exhaustion and tension.
3. Every report is green until it suddenly turns red
The project is already two months late, yet in every meeting its status officially remains “on track”. The head of department rewrites the report four times before sending it up. In the room, everyone nods in agreement; the real discussions begin afterwards, in the corridor.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this phenomenon “the second job”: on top of their actual responsibilities, every employee takes on a second, unpaid workload — hiding their mistakes, concealing their uncertainties and carefully managing the impression they make on others.
This drain on energy has a real cost. The effort of constantly faking control when you are in fact overwhelmed leads to exhaustion and lowers job satisfaction — a conclusion supported by a meta-analysis that brings together three decades of research (Hülsheger & Schewe, 2011).
The antidote is psychological safety, which means you can ask questions, flag risks and admit a mistake without fear of being humiliated or silenced. It does not mean giving up standards or accountability. Where this safety exists, teams learn faster, engage genuinely and perform better (Frazier et al., 2017).
In times of recession, the fear of restructuring collapses this safety precisely when it matters most. People do not work less, but a growing share of their energy is diverted towards self-protection, towards “the second job”, instead of solving problems. In practice, the company pays for full engagement but increasingly gets defensive behaviour.
4. The plan approved unanimously that refuses to move
The transformation plan was approved without reservation by the board in April. Six months later, execution is stalled. Although the CEO has made delegation a strategic priority, he still asks to be copied on every email and routinely takes back operational tasks on the grounds that he “gets it done faster himself”.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this paradox “immunity to change”: the leader genuinely wants the transformation but is sabotaged by a competing, unspoken commitment — a tacit fear, for example, that if the team works autonomously, his own role loses its purpose. In this internal conflict, the defence mechanisms win most of the time. The research confirms this gap: an intention, however sincere, does not automatically change behaviour, and there is a well-documented distance between a rational decision and concrete action (the intention-behavior gap; Webb & Sheeran, 2006).
This is why a process restructuring or a new set of KPIs rarely unblocks an organization. Ronald Heifetz (Harvard Kennedy School) sums up the cause perfectly: organizations often try to treat adaptive challenges with technical solutions.
- A technical problem has a known answer — a procedure, a new system or the expertise of an outside consultant.
- An adaptive challenge, by contrast, has no instruction manual: it requires the people involved to re-examine their fundamental beliefs, power relationships and ways of working.
When a director refuses to delegate out of a need for control or a fear of becoming irrelevant, no new organizational chart will produce autonomy. In unstable times, most critical blockages are adaptive, not structural.
5. Who is visible and who really matters
Some managers suddenly become far more vocal, claiming the credit for their team’s results. Others quietly handle the critical client account, take on the overtime needed to meet the delivery deadline and remain invisible in the monthly report. Meanwhile, a top performer raises his voice and belittles colleagues in meetings, and management looks the other way under the convenient excuse: “but he hits his targets”.
Pressure does not alter character; it simply removes the filters. And tolerating certain behavioural profiles generates hidden costs that financial reports do not capture. A landmark meta-analysis of more than 40,000 participants (O’Boyle et al., 2012) examined the three dimensions of the “Dark Triad” — narcissism, Machiavellianism (strategic manipulation) and subclinical psychopathy (a chronic lack of empathy). The finding is telling: these traits have a negligible correlation with direct individual performance, yet they explain more than a quarter of counterproductive work behaviour (CWB): escalating conflicts, internal sabotage, intimidation and taking credit for others’ work — with narcissism a strong predictor of this kind of toxicity.
Translated into business terms: an employee can generate profit on paper and, at the same time, cost the company more than they bring in. The bill does not show up in their individual KPIs, but in the erosion of the team around them: colleagues become defensive, cut their engagement to the minimum or resign (Felps et al., 2006).
This is where the diagnostic value of a crisis lies: it strips away the internal PR and shows exactly who is holding the organization up and who is weakening it from within.
6. The same five people
In almost every company there is a small core of four or five people who become the point where all the team’s emergencies converge: unresolved issues, the difficult client’s problem and the onboarding of every new colleague all land on their desks. Under pressure or in a crisis, their load grows exponentially. They are the ones answering emails close to midnight — until the day cynical detachment sets in: “it doesn’t matter anymore”.
Employees who consistently go beyond their job responsibilities pay a considerable personal price: role overload, high levels of stress and acute conflict between career and personal life (Bolino & Turnley, 2005). The mechanism is simple: burnout sets in when job demands keep rising while the buffering resources — autonomy, managerial support and recovery time — collapse (Crawford et al., 2010).
In this context, one distinction is fundamental: pressure is not the same as stress.
- Pressure is an objective external factor — the deadline, market volatility, the financial stakes.
- Stress, by contrast, is an internal response, triggered when the mind keeps replaying catastrophic scenarios long after the working day is over.
This continuous rumination and worry does not stay in the mind: it echoes in the body, keeping blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels elevated (Ottaviani et al., 2016), which delays the body’s physiological recovery.
An organization that treats the resilience of its most capable people as an inexhaustible resource makes a major strategic error: it risks decimating its core exactly when it needs it most — on the way out of the crisis and in the relaunch phase.
Part II. What we do with the data from the ground
Every crisis opens up two paths: the defensive reflex, which looks prudent in the short term but makes problems chronic, or the strategic response, which turns pressure into a leap in organizational maturity. Five leadership decisions separate resilient companies from fragile ones:
1. Centralize strategic direction, not the flow of information
The typical crisis reflex is to concentrate all decisions at the top. The mature response works the other way round: set two or three clear priorities firmly at board level and deliberately widen the channels for bad news. Leaders should regularly ask an uncomfortable question in every executive meeting: “What does nobody dare to tell us?”
2. Develop the capacity to think, not just one more course
A classic training programme adds technical knowledge, but it does not increase a person’s tolerance for ambiguity and complexity. Psychological maturity is built mainly on the ground: through tough decisions taken with support, clear feedback given at the right moment, and engagement with divergent perspectives that have to be reconciled. Crisis projects should be designed as learning opportunities, with support and mentoring, not as blind survival tests.
3. Secure psychological safety first, transparency second
Introducing “radical transparency” or aggressive feedback into a team that is already frightened produces only paralysis and defensiveness. In an environment without trust, forced transparency becomes toxic. The starting point is a simple governance rule: an error reported in time is an opportunity to learn and improve; encourage early reporting of errors and distinguish honest mistakes from deliberate concealment, negligence or rule-breaking.
4. Choose a single critical battle and calibrate through small steps
Instead of ten competing objectives, isolate the essential change and name the fear attached to it: “What are we really risking if we take this step?” Then turn the intention into a precise behavioural protocol of the form “if situation X arises, I respond with Y” (implementation intentions) and test it in a setting where the stakes are controlled. For example, the leader who refuses to delegate hands over responsibility and decision-making authority for a project and tests empirically whether the anticipated catastrophe actually happens. Plans anchored in concrete situations have a significantly higher execution rate than declarations of good intentions (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
5. Professionalize people decisions: separate promotions from restructuring
Decisions about human capital require two distinct analytical frameworks:
- Promotions and succession should be decided on the basis of a person’s capacity to meet the demands of the future role, assessed with scientifically validated instruments — not on noise or visibility within the company.
- Layoffs and restructuring require transparent, predictable criteria strictly anchored in the viability of the business. The criteria managers weigh most heavily are demonstrated commitment, performance record and trust, complemented by the quality of collaboration, potential and expertise (Stocker et al., 2018). Discrimination, nepotism, personal affinities or membership of circles of influence must be taken out of the equation, and the decision should be communicated by the direct manager with HR support; the conversation should not be delegated entirely to someone who has no relationship with the employee. I have set out the criteria and steps of this process in an earlier analysis of layoffs (in Romanian).
The rigour of this process is vital above all for those who stay: a large body of research covering more than 11,000 professionals (van Dierendonck & Jacobs, 2012) shows that survivors’ attachment after a restructuring depends directly on perceived procedural justice — for those who remain, the fairness of the restructuring process is strongly associated with their commitment to the organization. At the same time, explicitly protect the people who carry the operational load: redistribute the workload and build in real time for recovery. Do not confuse visibility with value: track real contribution, including the less visible work.
A bridge under a stress test is not judged by the elegance of its design, but by how its structure handles deformation under load. Economic pressure gives us, for a few quarters, an unvarnished X-ray of the organization — an image that is harder to obtain in stable times.
We can look at the results clearly and reinforce the foundations, or we can add another ton of pressure and hope the structure will not give way. Pressure shows us not only how people work, but also how well the organization supports them. What we choose to change now can make the difference between a company that merely gets through the crisis and one that comes out of it better prepared.
Claudia Indreica, PhD is an organizational psychologist and the founder of Psihoselect. For more than 25 years, she has supported multinationals and companies with international shareholders in Romania in their most difficult decisions about people: psychological profiling, executive search and organizational diagnosis and intervention. She has carried out more than 3,500 psychological profiles, many of them for top and middle management. She holds a PhD in organizational psychology from Babeș-Bolyai University.
She leads the Labour Market Task Force of Romanian Business Leaders, sits on the board of DWNT and coordinates the debates of the Râșnov Film and History Festival. She writes about the labour market and leadership for Economedia, on Substack and on LinkedIn.
Book an organizational diagnosis and intervention session with Psihoselect – we start from what is actually happening in your organization under pressure: where decisions get stuck, where energy is lost, and who is really holding the structure together.
Frequently asked questions
How does a recession affect organizations?
A recession rarely creates new problems in organizations; it makes existing ones visible and accelerates them. Under pressure, a few predictable patterns appear: decisions concentrate at the top, information arrives filtered, people invest more and more energy in protecting their image, approved plans stop being executed, toxic behaviour surfaces and a few key people become overloaded. That is why a crisis has diagnostic value: it shows how the organization really works.
Why do changes approved by leadership fail?
Because an intention, however sincere, does not automatically change behaviour: research documents a consistent gap between decision and action (Webb & Sheeran, 2006). Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this blockage “immunity to change”: an unspoken fear, for example of becoming unnecessary if the team works autonomously, cancels out the stated commitment. Most of these blockages are adaptive challenges, which require people to change how they think, not just a new procedure or organizational chart.
How can you prevent burnout among key people during a crisis?
Every company has a core of four or five people to whom every emergency goes, and in a crisis their load rises sharply. Burnout sets in when demands keep rising while resources – autonomy, managerial support and recovery time – decline (Crawford et al., 2010). Prevention means explicitly redistributing work, building in real recovery time and paying attention to rumination: pressure comes from the situation, but stress appears when the mind cannot stop replaying negative scenarios.
How do you make fair people decisions during a restructuring?
Separate two kinds of decisions. Promotions and succession should be based on a person’s capacity to meet the demands of the future role, assessed with scientifically validated instruments. Layoffs require transparent, objective criteria; managers weigh commitment, performance record and trust most heavily (Stocker et al., 2018). The decision should be communicated by the direct manager with HR support, and the fairness of the process matters greatly for those who stay as well (van Dierendonck & Jacobs, 2012).
