Leadership and Employees’ Mental Health Under Disruption: A Scoping Review and Critical Interpretive Synthesis

Abstract

This scoping review examines how leadership shapes employees’ mental health in disruptive, uncertain organizational contexts between 2020 and 2025. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, a systematic search across Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and PsycINFO yielded 43 eligible sources (30 empirical, 13 conceptual/theoretical). Data were extracted and synthesized through critical interpretive synthesis. Findings indicate that transformational, ethical, servant, inclusive, and health-oriented leadership are associated with favorable well-being outcomes and with psychosocial resources including psychological safety, trust, and psychological capital. Conversely, authoritarian, toxic, destructive, and laissez-faire leadership are associated with burnout, psychological distress, organizational silence, and turnover intentions. Building on these observed associations, the interpretive synthesis generates three theoretically plausible propositions: leaders’ emotional regulation may condition the protective potential of prosocial leadership; resource depletion under disruption may contribute to the intensification of dysfunctional leadership; and psychological safety, trust, and psychological capital may operate as interconnected mechanisms linking leadership with emotional exhaustion and resilience. These propositions represent synthesis-generated relationships requiring direct empirical testing rather than effects established by the reviewed evidence. Synthesizing these insights, this review proposes a dynamic emotional regulation framework of leadership under disruption. Rather than viewing leadership through static styles, the framework conceptualizes it as a relational, context-sensitive process whose implications for occupational mental health depend on psychosocial and contextual conditions.