Startups and Psycho Killers
A founder’s start-up culture can lead to team burnout, and how they lead is the accelerant
I’ve had my first “homework” back, and I’m pretty chuffed with the mark and feedback; not in the least, as this is the first academic essay I feel I have ever done. Sorry for the vagueness. I am sure I did some work at Oxford Poly 1990-1993, some of it involved words, and it did get marked, but I’m not sure any of it would have been described as a work of academic enquiry.
Barry’s feedback was that the argument sometimes lost its thread, the paragraphs were a little staccato, and I had assumed my reader knew more than they did. All fair. All useful. And all probably due to the fact that most of my writing has been commercial reports, where you assume (but shouldn’t) that the reader has a level of domain expertise.
The subject, however, how founders’ leadership styles interact with startup culture to produce employee burnout, felt worth rescuing from the footnotes of a marked essay. I think I was pulling at a thread of truth that those of you who have worked at a startup will almost certainly recognise the three character types I describe below. If you are an entrepreneur with a modicum of self-awareness (which is not a trait that troubles many wannabe masters of the universe), you may even realise you are one.
In either case, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
What are we actually talking about?
Burnout isn’t just being tired. Christina Maslach’s foundational research, now well over forty years old and still the dominant framework in the field, identifies three distinct forms: emotional exhaustion (the tank is empty), depersonalisation (cynical detachment from your work and the people around you), and reduced personal accomplishment (the creeping sense that none of what you’re doing actually matters or lands). These aren’t interchangeable, and as I’ll argue, different leadership environments tend to produce different flavours of it.
Startups are, by their nature, uncomfortable places to work. Rapid pivots, ambiguous roles, extreme uncertainty, and founder-driven cultures that can shift on a Tuesday afternoon are features, not bugs. The academic term for this cultural type is “adhocracy” — Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Values Framework places it at the outward-looking, flexible end of the spectrum, alongside words like decentralised, experimental, and innovation-hungry. In startup circles, people tend to describe the same culture as “fast-moving” or “entrepreneurial”, usually with a slightly evangelical glint in their eyes.
What doesn’t get discussed enough is the shadow side. The same flexibility that makes adhocracy cultures so energising also creates psychological vulnerability: fluid norms mean unclear expectations; sustained high demands mean resource depletion; the founder’s outsized influence on everything means that when their leadership wobbles, the whole organisation feels it. And yet, most of the research on burnout in startups focuses on the founders themselves — there are over 70,000 results on Google Scholar for that — while employee burnout in startups generates fewer than 17,000 results.
The people actually doing the work, in other words, are largely missing from the research.
Enter the founders
A startup founder is what organisational psychologists call a “situational constructionist”; they don’t just lead the business, they design the initial culture, set the implicit and explicit norms, and create the environment in which everyone else lives their working days. This gives them disproportionate influence, especially in the early stages, for better or worse.
The most widely used framework for measuring leadership style is the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, which groups behaviours into three broad types: transformational (inspiring, vision-led, emotionally invested), transactional (reward-and-performance-based, contingent), and laissez-faire (largely absent). All three appear in startups, and all three, when they go wrong in an adhocracy culture, produce something recognisable. Which brings me to my three characters.
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a naughty boy.
The False Prophet
Transformational leadership is the most celebrated style in the startup world. The charismatic founder with a compelling mission, who makes you feel like you’re changing the world, over stale pizza at 10 pm. And for a while, it works. Early employees frequently join because they believe in the mission; the alignment between what the organisation says it stands for and what the individual values is what Chatman (1989) calls Person-Organisation Fit, and in startups, it’s often doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The problem comes when the mission shifts, as it inevitably does in adhocratic cultures, or when the transformational rhetoric isn’t matched by the reality. When a leader sells a vision they can’t deliver, or uses inspirational language to paper over the absence of actual support and resources, Morrison and Robinson’s concept of psychological contract breach kicks in. You signed up for one thing; you got another. Initially, people protect themselves through denial; the “sunk cost fallacy” keeps them invested long after the evidence points the other way. Eventually, they disengage.
This is the burnout profile Maslach calls depersonalisation: the cynical detachment of someone who once cared deeply and now can’t bear to. In startup culture, it tends to look like people who were true believers quietly becoming the most checked-out people in the room.
All in it together?
The Bootstrap Bully
Transactional leadership isn’t glamorous, but it’s honest. Here’s what we need you to do; here’s what you’ll get if you do it. It’s a bargain, and in startups where equity, bonuses, and the promise of future reward often compensate for present resource constraints, it can be functional, even equitable.
The catch is that any bargain requires both parties to hold up their end. Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources Theory tells us that stress arises when the resources available to an individual are inadequate relative to the demands placed on them. In an adhocracy culture, where change is constant and uncertainty is baked in, resource constraints are not occasional inconveniences but structural features.
The founder who is comfortable living and breathing the mission, who built it, after all, and whose equity stake makes the discomfort more than worth it, often makes an unconscious assumption that their team will feel the same way. They won’t. Not indefinitely. Not without adequate support, sufficient clarity, and the occasional reality check on whether the bargain is still a fair one. When a transactional leader stops resourcing the team properly, either through insufficient capital, relentless pivoting, or simple neglect, they don’t just lose leverage. They become something else: the Bootstrap Bully, demanding effort that the organisation structurally can’t match with reward. The burnout this produces tends to look like exhaustion, Maslach’s second dimension, the depleted, overloaded, “what-is-even-the-point” variety.
The Dude abides…
The Hands-Free Hoper
The third type is the trickiest to spot, because it can masquerade as virtue. The laissez-faire founder who gives their people “space to thrive”, who “trusts the team”, who is “not a micromanager”, of course, sometimes this really is empowering autonomy. Under the right conditions, Lorinkova et al. (2013) showed it can genuinely improve team motivation and performance over time.
Under the wrong conditions, in an adhocracy culture characterised by changing priorities and structural ambiguity, the same approach creates role confusion. Nobody quite knows what’s expected of them, whether they’re doing a good job, or whether anyone in leadership has noticed or cares. In a 2014 longitudinal study, Skogstad and colleagues identified role ambiguity as one of the strongest predictors of workplace stress and dissatisfaction. The particular burnout it tends to produce, what Maslach calls reduced personal accomplishment, is arguably the quietest and most insidious: a gradual erosion of the sense that your contribution matters.
The Hands-Free Hoper doesn’t burn their team out through commission. They do it through absence.
What might be done about this?
I should be clear that what I’ve described above is a conceptual model rather than peer-reviewed research. The honest intellectual purpose of my essay was to argue that there’s enough scaffolding in the existing literature to make this worth investigating properly. The combined use of Bass and Avolio’s leadership questionnaire, Maslach’s burnout inventory, and Cameron and Quinn’s cultural assessment instrument could, in principle, start to reveal whether the pathways I’ve outlined are real and how significant they are in practice.
The more immediate practical purpose, though, is simpler. If you’re building a startup, or working in one, or investing in one, the questions this framework raises aren’t complicated:
You’re a compelling vision-led leader. Are you actually delivering on what you’re promising your team?
You’ve made an implicit bargain with your people. Have you given them what they need to hold up their end?
You trust your team to get on with it. Are they sure you know they even exist?
These aren’t the most comfortable questions for founders to sit with or, indeed, positions to realise you are in as an employee.
But if you do find yourself in the latter camp, the important thing to focus on is that burnout, as Maslach has recently emphasised in a BBC interview I stumbled across whilst away skiing, is not an individual failure. It’s an organisational one. And in startups, more often than not, that starts with whoever is standing at the front of the room telling you it’s going to be amazing.
As is now expected, I must now dip into my back catalogue of bangers from my youth. “Psycho Killer” has recently been re-imagined in a pop-video (are they still called this?) with the amazing Saoirse Ronan, who seems to be suffering from a pretty significant form of burnout.
For that matter, Slippery People (the name of my first band) also works well in describing the average False Prophet.
You can never have too much David Byrne in your life.
Other things I have learned
I was excited to hear that brain training can lower the long-term incidence of dementia over twenty years later, in the breakthrough ACTIVE (Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly) study.
This is important to me as having survived an acute brain injury, I do have a higher chance of developing dementia in later life.
I immediately hoped that my master’s would guarantee my marbles until at least my 74th birthday, but it would appear that the determining factor is the speed of processing, and Lou will testify that there was nothing speedy about the gestation of my academic essays.
Academic References
Avolio, B. J., Bass, B. M., & Jung, D. I. (1999). Re-examining the components of transformational and transactional leadership using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 72(4), 441–462. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317999166789
Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (1999). Diagnosing and changing organizational culture. Addison-Wesley.
Chatman, J. A. (1989). Improving interactional organizational research: A model of person-organization fit. Academy of Management Review, 14(3), 333–349. https://doi.org/10.2307/258171
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
Lorinkova, N. M., Pearsall, M. J., & Sims, H. P. (2013). Examining the differential longitudinal performance of directive versus empowering leadership in teams. Academy of Management Journal, 56(2), 573–596. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0132
Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2(2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030020205
Morrison, E. W., & Robinson, S. L. (1997). When employees feel betrayed: A model of how psychological contract violation develops. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 226–256. https://doi.org/10.2307/259230
Skogstad, A., Hetland, J., Glasø, L., & Einarsen, S. (2014). Is avoidant leadership a root cause of subordinate stress? Longitudinal relationships between laissez-faire leadership and role ambiguity. Work & Stress, 28(4), 323–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2014.957362
Coe et al, (2025). Impact of cognitive training on claims-based diagnosed dementia over 20 years: evidence from the ACTIVE study. https://doi.org/10.1002/trc2.70197