What is it about?
Brief 1 of 3. This diagnostic brief names two patterns of misused positional power that are common in organizations but rarely identified: positional aggression — the use of authority to regulate behavior and emotion under the guise of care or alignment — and discursive distancing — the use of language to separate leaders from accountability through ambiguity and selective transparency. Includes observable markers for each pattern, their organizational impact, and the SHAPE counterpractice framework.
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Why is it important?
This brief does not assume bad actors. It assumes power — and asks what happens when power operates without sufficient restraint, accountability, or self-awareness. The patterns it names — positional aggression and discursive distancing — appear across every sector and role. They are not confined to toxic workplaces or extreme personalities. They emerge wherever authority exists under pressure and goes unexamined. The result is rarely overt. More often it is subtle: regulation disguised as culture, ambiguity defended as prudence, language used to maintain authority while avoiding accountability. These patterns erode trust quietly. They produce compliance without consent, engagement without safety, and alignment without belonging. Many people already sense something is wrong. They describe meetings that feel performative, communication that sounds polished but evasive, and leadership that appears supportive while quietly constraining agency. These experiences are routinely dismissed as personality differences or organizational friction. They are not. They are patterns. When patterns go unnamed, they are difficult to interrupt. This brief offers language — not to accuse, but to clarify. Because leadership that cannot name its own use of power cannot be trusted to steward it well.
Perspectives
I have sat in rooms where power was wielded with confidence and without conscience. I have watched organizations absorb the cost of leadership that could not — or would not — look honestly at itself. And I have been honest enough with myself to know that I have not always been the leader I intended to be. That is where this research begins. Not in theory, but in witness. Power unbridled in organizations does not always announce itself. It rarely arrives as cruelty. More often it arrives as certainty : the unexamined assumption that authority confers correctness, that position earns deference, and that discomfort in those below is simply the friction of necessary decisions. It is this quiet, confident irresponsibility that concerns me most. Not the dramatic failures of leadership we read about, but the ordinary, daily exercise of power that goes unreflected upon and unchallenged. Organizations pay an enormous price for this. Not always in ways that appear on a balance sheet, but in the erosion of trust, the quiet exit of talent, and the slow replacement of genuine engagement with performance and compliance. When I wrote in the brief that leadership that cannot examine its own use of power cannot be trusted to steward it well, I was not issuing an indictment. I was extending an invitation toward the kind of self-awareness & examination that makes leadership worth following. Accountability is not a threat to authority. It is the condition that makes authority legitimate. This is the work I believe matters most right now
Annalisa Adams-Qualtiere
University of Southern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Positional Aggression and Discursive Distancing A Diagnostic Brief on Observable Leadership Power Patterns and Organizational Impact, January 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6133326.
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