10/30/2025

Fight Versus Flight: When a Leader’s Fears Turn Into Anger

Sometimes, fear, insecurity and employee behaviors make bosses angry

You probably understand the typical responses to fear are fight or flight. Two other options are freeze and fawn, which, like flight, are used by people trying to avoid or minimize a scary situation. In the context of leadership advice, we have tended to focus on the flight response — the tendency to withdraw meekly from tough or abusive situations and to suffer in silence. That emphasis is one reason why concepts like psychological safety are so widely discussed these days.

What I think we've ignored for far too long are the fight reactions to fear — where human fear also shows up as anger, disgust, contempt, and rejection. There is abundant data showing that these forms of aggressive behavior leave masses of employees afraid. Yet somehow, we’ve largely failed to consider that those angry behaviors — more often than not coming from people above us in the hierarchy — are also a sign of fear.

For people in power, and men in particular, it simply may feel more acceptable to respond to fear with a fight response rather than a flight response. That's the way we have been socialized; it may even be a remnant of our evolution. It's also highly damaging in modern organizations.

Please select this link to read the complete article from MIT Sloan Management Review.