General Counsel’s Role in Mitigating Organisational Burnout

Pernille, Steen Pedersen, Assistant Professor, CBS, Denmark

We continue to witness high levels of stress and burnout among in-house counsel and managers. General counsel (also called ’lead in-house counsel’) can play a pivotal role in mitigating burnout by promoting what Amy Edmondson calls ’psychological safety’ — a shared belief within a team that taking ’interpersonal risk is safe’. We also discuss first author Pernille S. Pedersen’s work on the corrosive effects of shame. We then draw on the five elements of the dynamic capability the second author Constance E. Bagley defined as ’legal astuteness’ and apply them to psychological safety. We conclude by explaining how the general counsel can orchestrate firm-specific training and other practices as part of the top management team’s and the board’s efforts to change the workplace from one where the employees are, in the words of Jeffrey Pfeffer, literally ’dying for a paycheck’, to one where employees can thrive.

Dr. Pernille Steen Pedersen is an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Her research focuses on identifying and understanding triggers of work-related stress and how leadership can address stress-mitigation in a day-to-day practice. She has developed research-based tools for management and employees that outline how stress may be handled and prevented, by focusing on social relations and the reduction of shame in cooperative dialogues between management and the employees. Her coauthor Professor Constance E. Bagley is a Visiting Professor at CBS and a former professor at Yale and Harvard Universities and senior lecturer at Stanford University. She is also Founder and CEO of the boutique consulting firm Bagley Strategic Advisors LLC.

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