When our team studied leading through polycrisis, we found research showing that hope is a path forward for leaders. We also found that not everyone was comfortable with the word “hope.” The concern was fair. In everyday use, hope can sound soft and passive, a polite way to avoid hard if not insurmountable realities.
Leaders facing economic shocks, geopolitical instability, and climate disruption don’t need platitudes. But researchers use “hope” differently. The more we learned about what employees are living through, the more convinced we became that serious attention to the full range of hope, individually and collectively, is essential.
Most employees face many crises at once, and they’re often interconnected.
We surveyed 1,080 employees across 36 countries and 35 industries, and asked how 10 types of crises had affected their personal lives and their organizations during the previous year.
The typical employee reported being affected by 8 of the 10 crisis types. The single most common answer was all 10. Economic disruption touched 93% of people, both personally and at work. And 65% said the crises interact and make one another worse, which is the defining feature of what researchers call a polycrisis.
This isn’t only a C-suite experience. Our sample was split evenly between individual contributors and people in management, director, and executive roles. Many people across the globe are worn down by disruption, ambiguity, and change fatigue.
How do these conditions affect people? Dirk Lindebaum, editor of Academy of Management Learning & Education, traces a predictable sequence. Repeated focus on the crises becomes rumination. The sheer scale leads people to see the situation as overwhelming and hopeless. The result is often decision paralysis.
Decision paralysis has consequences: When people in organizations stop acting on the challenges in front of them, the crises often deepen. For leaders, hope is what replaces paralysis.
What Is Hope? The Research Definition
The most widely used scientific definition of hope comes from psychologist C. R. Snyder. It defines hope as a cognitive process with 2 parts. Agency is the belief that we can act toward a goal. Pathways is the belief that there are ways forward. Through this lens, hope requires goals, it can be measured, and it has decades of validation behind it.
That’s different from the kinds of hope people rightly distrust. Anne Dolan distinguishes active hope from its passive cousins: hoping for a lottery win, waiting for things to improve on their own, or assuming someone else will fix the problem. Active hope is the belief that you can overcome obstacles, and it leads to problem-solving and engagement.
Lindebaum identifies the tension plainly: Holding on to hope in hard times helps us survive if we act. It endangers us if we wait to be rescued. Skeptics are right to worry about the second kind of hope. The first kind is what we study.
Hope vs. Optimism
A similar distinction applies to optimism. Optimism is the expectation that things will turn out well. Hope is the belief that your actions still matter and that you can find a way, even when the path isn’t clear.
Consider a pair of leaders facing the same market shock. The first tells the team, “We’ve weathered tough times before. Things will improve.” That may lift spirits briefly, but it gives the team nothing to do. The second leader says, “This is going to be hard. Here’s what we’re protecting, and there’s more than one way to get there. If the first one stalls, we’ll switch to the next. We start this week, and we’ll keep adjusting as we go.”
Research comparing hope and optimism finds that both involve positive, future-oriented expectations. Hope is more closely tied to goal pursuit and performance, which becomes more important when plans keep getting disrupted.
The Importance of Hope for Leaders
Attending to hope doesn’t mean downplaying how serious things are. Research on climate anxiety has found that hope and anxiety can coexist and even reinforce each other in motivating action. Real hope requires truth-telling: this is hard, this is uncertain, and people aren’t powerless.
Hope also works in practical ways. It helps people see links between their choices and what happens in the world. It counteracts the risk aversion that sets in under threat. And hope builds on itself, because reaching one intermediate goal generates the next. Lindebaum calls this “the escalator of hoping.”
Under uncertainty, the momentum hope generates is what keeps leaders and their teams going instead of shutting down.
Hope Can Be Learned & Built Together
If you develop leaders, this is the most important point: Hope is learnable. People can break global crises into actions they can take locally. The small gains from those actions then spread outward, as people pick up on one another’s energy, to teams, organizations, and beyond.
That spread happens because hope is social. High-hope people invest more in relationships and report more support, and researchers increasingly contend that hope is best built through connection and collective effort. That’s why we’re examining hope at the organizational level as well as the individual level.
At the organizational level, hope is the disciplined refusal to surrender purpose to the weight of reality.
Our emerging research is exploring what else sustains hope at work beyond agency and pathways, including the role of the impact an organization is trying to have in the world. We’ll share more soon.
How Leaders Can Build Hope at Work
Why hope matters to leaders: They largely determine whether people hold on to it or lose it. Hope collapses when organizations bury people in bureaucratic process, trap them in silos, or fixate on short-term survival at the expense of purpose. Hope returns when leaders restore agency, clarify next steps, and reconnect people to meaningful impact.
- Tell the truth. Hope that ignores how hard things are won’t be trusted, so start with an honest account.
- Ask 2 simple questions. What can you do today? What can you do next? Not someday, and not after certainty arrives.
- Pursue visible small wins. Momentum builds belief, belief fuels effort, and effort compounds into resilience.
- Connect the work to impact. People need to see their organization tackling challenges tied to its purpose.
- Make meaning social. People lose hope fastest when they feel invisible or isolated. Remind them: you count, this counts, and we’re in this together.
Why We’re Keeping ‘Hope’
Some people hesitate over the word “hope,” and we understand why. We’ve decided to keep hope, and to define it every time we use it. We’re not alone. The importance of hope has recently been the subject of an AMLE editors’ essay, a full issue of Policy and Practice, a 2026 theory paper in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, and an open Organization Studies special issue call.
Walking away from the word now would disconnect our work from a validated theory just as the field is turning toward it.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
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