How Leadership Archetypes Shape Collective Efficacy Under Pressure
Leadership teams are often composed of capable, experienced, and well-intentioned people. They share responsibility, purpose, and accountability for complex work. In stable conditions, this capability is usually sufficient to maintain momentum and alignment.
Under pressure, something different happens. Leadership does not disappear—it narrows.
As time compresses, stakes rise, and uncertainty increases, each leader relies more heavily on their leadership archetype: the stable way they interpret situations, prioritise action, and exercise authority. What the team experiences is not the full range of each leader’s capability, but a more concentrated expression of it.
Collective efficacy is shaped in these moments—not by individual competence, but by how narrowed archetypal patterns interact.
Collective efficacy is not a trait—it is an interaction
Collective efficacy refers to a group’s shared belief in its capacity to organise and act effectively (Bandura, 1997). In leadership teams, this belief is not formed abstractly. It is built—and eroded—through repeated interaction, particularly when conditions are demanding.
Leadership teams rarely lose efficacy because members lack skill or commitment. They lose efficacy when coordination becomes harder to sustain under pressure.
Research in organisational and team psychology consistently shows that under stress, groups default to habitual patterns of interaction unless those patterns are made explicit and deliberately managed (Salas et al., 2015). In leadership teams, those habitual patterns are archetypal.
Archetypal narrowing under pressure
Each leadership archetype brings particular strengths into a team: ways of creating clarity, maintaining momentum, managing risk, or sustaining relationships. In calm conditions, these contributions tend to complement one another.
Under pressure, however, the range of expression narrows.
Leaders rely more strongly on what feels immediately effective and familiar. Certain traits are amplified. Others recede. This narrowing is predictable and consistent within each archetype.
What the team experiences is not diversity of approach, but concentrated difference.
One leader’s archetype may narrow toward decisiveness and control.
Another may narrow toward speed and action.
Another toward analysis and caution.
Another toward relational attention and support.
Each response makes sense. Each is a rational expression of leadership under constraint. The challenge is not the presence of these responses, but their interaction.
When archetypal drift goes unrecognised
When archetypal narrowing is not recognised, leadership teams begin to respond to one another’s amplified traits rather than to the situation itself.
Decisiveness is experienced as rigidity.
Urgency is experienced as recklessness.
Caution is experienced as resistance.
Relational focus is experienced as avoidance.
None of these interpretations are inherent in the behaviour itself. They arise because behaviour is being read without archetypal context.
Research on adaptive leadership highlights that under pressure, misinterpretation of intent is one of the primary drivers of breakdown in collective action (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Leaders act in good faith, but without shared language, their actions are interpreted through narrowing lenses.
What looks like conflict is often uncoordinated archetypal drift.
Pressure amplifies what teams rely on most
Pressure does not introduce new leadership behaviours. It amplifies what teams already rely on.
As demands increase:
- interpretive speed increases
- tolerance for ambiguity decreases
- behavioural variation contracts
This amplification makes archetypal patterns more influential, not less. Teams that lack shared language for these patterns must rely on assumption and inference. Teams that can name archetypal narrowing gain foresight.
Research on high-performing teams consistently identifies meta-awareness—understanding how the team functions—as a key contributor to adaptability and sustained performance (Salas et al., 2015; Edmondson, 2018).
Shared archetypal language enables coordination
When leadership teams share language for leadership archetypes and how those archetypes narrow under pressure, coordination becomes intentional.
Leaders anticipate one another’s responses.
Differences are interpreted accurately rather than personally.
Behaviour is understood in context.
Collective efficacy strengthens not because leaders become more similar, but because their differences become intelligible and usable.
This is not about smoothing out leadership.
It is about working with the patterns already present.
Why this is the focus of the work
The Leadership Archetypes work exists to support leadership teams in recognising how archetypes express and narrow under pressure—before those patterns begin to work at cross-purposes.
By making archetypal patterns visible, leaders can:
- coordinate action more effectively
- maintain alignment under load
- sustain collective efficacy across changing conditions
This work does not aim to change who leaders are. It provides clarity about how they lead—individually and together—so that strengths can be amplified deliberately and teams can function with coherence under pressure.
More detail about the Leadership Archetypes work and the upcoming workshop is available here.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
Edmondson, A. (2018). The fearless organization. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.
Salas, E., Shuffler, M. L., Thayer, A. L., Bedwell, W. L., & Lazzara, E. H. (2015). Understanding and improving teamwork in organizations. Human Resource Management, 54(4), 599–622.