Psychosocial risk as a leadership system problem: from compliance anxiety to evidence-based culture design

Purpose Psychological injury claims are rising due to a lack of architecture, not empathy. This paper problematises the prevailing reliance on individual leadership traits and bureaucratic compliance, arguing instead that psychosocial risk is an emergent property of “wicked” organisational complexity. Design/methodology/approach This paper employs an integrative conceptual review. It synthesises wicked problems theory to frame the context, the job demands-resources (JD-R) model to explain the mechanism of harm and social information processing (SIP) theory to explain the transmission of safety culture. These lenses are integrated to construct a new conceptual model: the psychosocial leadership architecture (PLA). Findings The paper distinguishes between measurable risk and unknowable uncertainty, arguing that standard compliance matrices fail to capture complex social hazards. It proposes the PLA as a three-tiered framework (structure, practice and governance) and identifies the safety signal function of leadership as the primary mechanism for buffering worker health against demands. Practical implications The PLA offers executives a blueprint for engineering roles and decision protocols that prevent harm, providing a pathway to legal defensibility while securing high performance. Originality/value Challenging the orthodoxy of “soft” leadership, this paper proposes that safety is achieved through hard structural design. It integrates the concept of avoidable employee harm and identifies specific people management risk contexts (e.g. rostering) as primary intervention sites.