Leadership inconsistency and employee behavioural health in start-up workplaces

Start-up workplaces are marked by rapid change, informal authority structures, and shifting priorities. While these conditions foster innovation, they also generate persistent uncertainty that can undermine employee behavioral health. Existing research on leadership and well-being has largely focused on stable contexts or outcome-based indicators such as burnout and turnover, offering limited insight into the everyday processes through which leadership behavior produces behavioral health strain in volatile environments. This study examines leadership inconsistency as a chronic behavioral health stressor in a start-up. Using analytic autoethnography, it draws on eighteen months of insider engagement within a small Indian start-up. Data include field notes, internal communications, task records, performance feedback, and reflexive memos, analyzed through iterative coding, constant comparison, and process tracing. Findings reveal three interrelated categories of leadership-driven micro-shocks: emotionally draining interactions, sudden and contradictory workload shifts, and persistently unclear decision and authority expectations. These micro-shocks accumulated, increasing emotional regulation demands, cognitive vigilance, anticipatory anxiety, and decision avoidance. This study contributes to workplace behavioral health research by framing leadership inconsistency as a cumulative, process-based risk embedded in routine behavior and highlights consistency and interpretive stability as essential protections for employee well-being in start-ups.