07/18/2025

How Leaders Can De-stress Their Teams

Executives don’t just set the tone from the top—they set the mood

Teamwork means everybody has an opportunity to work together. But what if everybody is stressed, together?

Leadership literature tends to look at workplace stress through the lens of the individual, the way personal and professional challenges erode a single worker’s engagement and well-being. Stress is a collective experience as well, though. When teams are facing the same kinds of stressors at the same time, productivity takes a hit and resentment festers. Anybody at an association who’s inherited a notoriously dysfunctional committee will recognize that dynamic.

In an article at the Sloan MIT Management Review, business scholars Allen Morrison and David Forster note how “most organizations still lack systemic approaches for managing stress across teams.” And their research suggests the main culprit isn’t so much the stress among the team members as it is the stress in the team’s leader. As they put it, leaders too often run teams in ways that exacerbate team stress, “undermining team cohesion and performance."

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.