Eco-Leadership and emotional containment: distributed leadership requires distributed containment

Simon Western

Chapter 18 in Research Handbook on Emotional Intelligence at Work, 2026, pp 344-369 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In today's precarious, interdependent age, organisations must adapt to fast-paced change if they are to thrive and survive. This means reducing controlling hierarchy, bureaucracy with rigid structures and cultures. Adopting more adaptive and flexible organisational structures and cultures is the most favoured response to this challenge. What is missing in the organisational literature is how to replace the emotional safety required for high quality organisational functioning in these new organisational forms with flatter hierarchies and more open cultures. Emotional containment that was previously delivered through traditional hierarchical structures (albeit whilst creating dependency cultures). The chapter explores how collective emotional intelligence can be harnessed to deliver the emotional safety, and emotional containment necessary when utilising Eco-Leadership practices. Eco-Leadership focuses on unleashing leadership throughout organisations, but realises that to distribute leadership requires distributed emotional containment too. Reworking traditional psychoanalytic insights on containment (Bion, 1961) the chapter critiques regressive containment models, shifting the focus from individual to systemic capability, offering a new emotional containment framework that enables dynamic and adaptive organisations.

Keywords: Eco-Leadership; Adaptive Organizations; Emotional Containment; Emotional Intelligence; Organizational Culture; Systems Psychodynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035332519
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