Between inspiration and betrayal: narratives of leadership and retention in the Greek special forces

Purpose This study explores how officers in the Greek Special Forces construct meanings of loyalty, leadership and betrayal through their narrative accounts of service. Rather than treating retention as a behavioral outcome, the study interprets it as an ongoing process of identity, sense-making and moral evaluation within a high-stakes, hierarchical organizational culture. The analysis focuses on how officers author stories of belonging and disillusionment, how leadership episodes become moral turning points, and how silence, voice and organizational practices shape the plausibility of staying or leaving. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a constructivist and reflexive qualitative approach, the study analyzes nine in-depth interviews with junior officers and recent leavers from the Greek Special Forces. Using narrative-thematic analysis, accounts are interpreted as identity performances through which officers make sense of leadership, power, fairness and their own place in the organization. Reflexive interpretation, supported by a positional insider perspective, foregrounds how stories are co-constructed through emotion, hierarchy and institutional discourse. The analysis attends to turning-point episodes, narrative arcs and practices of voice and silence. Findings Officers' accounts cluster around seven narrative themes that organize experiences of leadership, organizational fit, values, support, external context, career trajectories and life-course pressures. Across these themes, four narrative arcs emerge: steadfast loyalty, conditional commitment, quiet endurance and disillusioned exit. Key turning points include breaches of fairness, unmet expectations of care and the non-uptake of voice. Leadership practices, transparent, caring or opaque, act as moral signals that confirm or undermine identity alignment. Silence operates as an identity-preserving response to power rather than simple disengagement. Research limitations/implications Findings derive from a small sample within a specific elite military context and are shaped by the researcher's insider status. Nevertheless, the study highlights how organizational membership is sustained or withdrawn through narrative labor rather than fixed attitudes. Implications include the need for qualitative leadership research to attend to emotional, moral and identity dynamics, and for future studies to engage longer-term, comparative or cross-cultural designs that examine how narrative arcs shift over time and under different organizational conditions. Practical implications The study suggests that organizational practices become meaningful only through the stories members tell about them. Initiatives such as transparent advancement, consistent care, mentorship or family support function not as “interventions” but as discursive resources that render the organization worthy of commitment. Leaders influence retention not by control mechanisms, but by authoring episodes that reaffirm identity alignment. Practical insights lie in listening to how members narrate fairness, care and recognition, and adjusting organizational practices to sustain coherent and credible moral relationships. Social implications By illuminating how loyalty, silence and betrayal are shaped within closed, hierarchical institutions, the study contributes to wider conversations about power, moral injury and voice suppression in high-risk public organizations. It highlights the emotional and ethical labor required to sustain service identities and shows how institutional practices can either reinforce or erode social trust. These insights extend beyond the military to other high-commitment settings where individuals negotiate belonging under structural constraint. Originality/value This study offers one of the first narrative-interpretive analyses of leadership and retention within an elite European military unit. It introduces a model of narrative arcs that captures how officers move between loyalty and disillusionment through everyday episodes of leadership, fairness and care. By reframing retention as identity and meaning-making rather than behavior, the paper contributes to qualitative leadership studies and aligns with calls for a “critical imagination” in organizational research. It also advances understanding of power, silence and moral emotion in extreme-context organizations.