Organisational Level Resources

The Evidence on Workplace Wellbeing

Fleming, W. J. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level interventions. Industrial Relations Journal. 

The large study finding that individual wellness programs, mindfulness, resilience training, apps, produce no meaningful benefit, while only connection-building (volunteering) helped. The empirical floor under “perks won’t fix a sick system.”

Marmot, M. (2004). The status syndrome: How social standing affects our health and longevity. Times Books; and the Whitehall II studies. 

The landmark evidence that control and autonomy over one’s work powerfully predict health, independent of rank. The scientific basis for treating autonomy as a structural health lever.

Karasek, R., & Theorell, T. (1990). Healthy work. Basic Books; and Siegrist, J. (1996), on effort-reward imbalance. 

The two foundational models of work stress: job strain (high demand, low control) and effort-reward imbalance. What actually drives workplace illness.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience. World Psychiatry. 

Burnout as an occupational phenomenon arising from six mismatches (workload, control, reward, community, fairness, values), not a personal weakness. You fix it by fixing the conditions.

Designing Humane Policy & Ownership

Schor, J. B., et al. (2022–2025). The four-day week global trials (4 Day Week Global; Nature Human Behaviour, 2025). 

The large multi-country evidence that reduced hours for the same pay cut burnout and sick days while maintaining productivity and revenue. The proof that protecting wellbeing improves rather than costs performance.

Pang, A. S.-K. (2020). Shorter: Work better, smarter, and less. PublicAffairs. 

The practical companion on how organisations actually redesign work for fewer hours and better output.

Blasi, J., Freeman, R., & Kruse, D. (2013). The citizen’s share. Yale University Press; and the employee-ownership literature. 

The evidence on employee ownership, cooperatives, and shared capitalism: more resilient firms, better-distributed gains, higher engagement. The case for changing the deepest policy, who owns the organisation.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics. Random House.

A reframe of the economic goal from extraction and endless growth to meeting human needs within ecological limits, the macro frame under stakeholder and steward-ownership models.

Autonomy, Motivation & Psychological Safety

Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Riverhead. 

The accessible synthesis of self-determination theory for work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose drive performance far better than carrots and sticks. A clean entry to the motivation science.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M., and the self-determination-theory work literature (Deci, Olafsen, & Ryan, 2017). 

The rigorous foundation under Drive: the three basic needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) and the evidence that autonomy-supportive management improves both wellbeing and performance.

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The fearless organization. Wiley; and Edmondson (1999), the original research. 

The definitive work on psychological safety, the strongest predictor of team effectiveness, with the crucial calibration that it is candour and accountability, not comfort or niceness.

Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing organizations. Nelson Parker. 

A widely-read account of self-managing, purpose-driven, “teal” organisations that distribute authority. Inspiring and worth reading critically, since its case studies are selective and some celebrated examples later struggled, judge the practices by results, not the framework’s enthusiasm.

Regulated Leadership

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership. Harvard Business Review Press. 

The accessible case that a leader’s primary task is emotional, setting the group’s affective tone through resonance, the popular version of the emotional-contagion evidence the leadership page rests on.

Sy, T., Côté, S., & Saavedra, R. (2005). The contagious leader. Journal of Applied Psychology. 

The experimental evidence that a leader’s mood spreads to the group and shapes its coordination and effort. The science under “leaders set the collective cortisol.”

Cheng, J. T., Tracy, J. L., & Henrich, J. (2013). Two ways to the top: Dominance and prestige. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The research distinguishing status seized through intimidation (dominance) from status granted through earned respect (prestige). The evidence base for “coherence, not charisma.”

Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant leadership. Paulist Press. 

The foundational reframe of the leader as serving the group’s growth and coherence rather than extracting from it. Dated in places, enduring in principle.

Team Coherence & Collective Intelligence

Woolley, A. W., et al. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330. 

The landmark finding that a group’s collective intelligence is predicted by social sensitivity and equal turn-taking, not members’ individual IQ. The hard evidence under “regulate together, not against each other.”

Google re:Work, Project Aristotle (Rozovsky, 2015). 

The large internal study finding psychological safety the single strongest factor distinguishing high-performing teams.

The physiological- and inter-brain-synchrony research (e.g. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2021). 

The evidence that teams synchronise physiologically and neurally, and that this tracks coordination, cohesion, and performance. The literal basis for “a team is a collective nervous system.” The synchrony-performance link is real but complex, not a simple “more is better.”

Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team. Jossey-Bass. 

A widely-used practitioner model placing trust (and the safety to be vulnerable) at the base of team function. Simplified and unproven as a precise framework, useful as a practical lens that rhymes with the evidence.

On Collective Coordination

The Game B discourse and Rule Omega (“I commit to presuming there is a signal in your noise”) are useful contemporary framings for cooperation beyond zero-sum competition and for good-faith communication across difference, consonant with the collective-intelligence and relational-coherence material, read as orienting ideas rather than settled method. Note that the broader questions in the working notes, public choice theory and the failures of voting, the governance of AI and data, the coming inequality of human enhancement, and criminal-justice rehabilitation models are species- and governance-scale concerns better placed at the Global Level, where they are taken up. The generational-cycle theories (the Strauss-Howe “Fourth Turning” model) are best treated as pop-historiography, evocative but widely criticised as unfalsifiable, and read alongside the rigorous collapse scholarship on the Death/Rebirth shelf rather than relied on.

The Big-Picture Histories

The civilisation-scale histories on the existing shelf, Sapiens, Homo Deus, The Dawn of Everything, The WEIRDest People in the World, The Silk Roads, Origin Story, Scale, Sand Talk, and the ideologically-loaded The Sovereign Individual, The Bitcoin Standard, and The Rational Optimist, are treated in full on the Death/Rebirth of Society Resources shelf, where they sit most naturally, with the same calibration (read the last three critically for their cargo). They bear on organisations as background on how humans coordinate at scale.