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Manager Burnout and Women in Leadership: Three Emotional Intelligence Capacities That Predict Employee Wellbeing
Women strong in three emotional intelligence capacities are 8.6 times more likely to have high workplace wellbeing — insights from a peer-reviewed study of 43,080 women across 114 countries. Because these capacities are learnable, organizations can build them to strengthen wellbeing across the leadership pipeline — and the study found middle managers most at risk.
Overview
Situation: Organizations invest heavily in women’s leadership development, retention, and wellbeing, but results vary widely — and the conversation often stays too broad to act on. Women’s wellbeing generally rises with seniority, yet middle managers are caught in a squeeze: high emotional demand, less access to resources. Six Seconds set out to identify which specific, measurable capacities actually predict whether women thrive at work — across career levels, regions, and time.
Solution: Researchers analyzed Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI) data from 43,080 women across 114 countries, gathered between 2019 and 2025. They examined 18 emotional intelligence “Brain Talents” against workplace wellbeing at four career levels — from early-career employees to senior executives — and tested whether the strongest patterns held across seniority, geography, and the six-year period.
Results: In this peer-reviewed study on women in leadership published in Frontiers in Psychology (2026), three capacities stood out — Commitment, Resilience, and Proactivity. Women strong in all three were 8.6 times more likely to have high workplace wellbeing, and the usual wellbeing advantage of seniority all but disappeared. Because these capacities are measurable with the SEI and developable through training and coaching, they give organizations a concrete way to strengthen the leadership pipeline. Notably, women in middle management were the only group whose wellbeing declined year over year and never recovered to 2019 levels — making them the highest-return place to start.
“The management transition may function as a resource passageway that organizations can open or block by design…. These findings suggest that targeted development of specific emotional intelligence resources may support Wellbeing for women leaders across career levels.”
– Freedman, Iseppato, Choi & Freedman (2026), Into the Headwinds, Frontiers in Psychology. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848879
“Conversations about retention, manager burnout, and women’s advancement often stall because they lack a clear, evidence-based path forward. This research gives organizations one: key capacities that predict whether women thrive, and they’re learnable. The opportunity for organizations is to develop them deliberately and clear the path so women can actually use them. The responsibility doesn’t fall on women alone — and the return, especially in middle management, ripples across the entire leadership pipeline.”
— Patricia E. Freedman, lead author; VP of Social Impact, Six Seconds
Situation
Despite decades of organizational investment, women’s advancement and workplace wellbeing remain at risk — and corporate commitment to closing the gaps is now declining. Structural barriers persist at every career level: sponsorship gaps, flexibility penalties, disproportionate caregiving burdens, emotional labor, and promotion bias. The first promotion into management remains the most persistent bottleneck in women’s careers — just 93 women promoted for every 100 men, a ratio that has held for 11 consecutive years — and women managers report the highest burnout of any group in the workforce.
Yet most research has treated emotional intelligence as a single predictor — asking whether higher-EQ people generally fare better — rather than identifying which specific capacities matter most for women across different roles. As the authors put it, “Women’s workplace wellbeing has two components: the capacities women bring and the conditions organizations provide.” If some of those capacities depend on organizational conditions to develop, then knowing which ones matter most tells leaders exactly where to invest. This study set out to answer that question at scale.
Solution
The team analyzed Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment (SEI) data from 43,080 women across 114 countries, collected from 2019 to 2025 and balanced across three global regions (Asia, Europe, and North America; n = 14,360 each) and four career levels — Student (3,783), Employee (20,673), Management (13,371), and Senior Executive (5,253).
The researchers used Conservation of Resources (COR) theory as their framework — the idea that personal resources cluster in “caravans,” and that organizational conditions act as “resource passageways” that either open or block their growth. They tested which Brain Talents most differentiated career levels and most strongly predicted Wellbeing. Five rose together as a “Resource Caravan”: Commitment, Resilience, Proactivity, Imagination, and Risk Tolerance.
To confirm the pattern wasn’t an artifact of age, region, or timing, the team ran three robustness checks: a within-generation analysis restricted to Millennials (n = 21,283), a temporal-stability comparison across two non-overlapping periods, and cross-regional replication across Asia, Europe, and North America. The strongest and most consistent combination — Commitment, Resilience, and Proactivity — was named the Resource Triad.
Results
In this peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology (2026), researchers analyzed SEI data from 43,080 women across 114 countries, examining 18 emotional intelligence “Brain Talents” against workplace Wellbeing at four career levels. Three capacities — Commitment, Resilience, and Proactivity — emerged as the strongest predictors, and the effect held across regions, generations, and all seven study years.
FAR STRONGER WELLBEING
Women in the top tier on all three capacities were 8.6 times more likely to report high workplace wellbeing than women in the bottom tier (95% CI 7.96–9.34).
LEARNABLE & CUMULATIVE
Each capacity added ~12% wellbeing boost. Women strong in all 3 reached high wellbeing 58% of the time, versus just 21% for those strong in none — a graded, build-as-you-go effect.
SQUEEZED MIDDLE
Women middle managers showed the largest wellbeing decline of any group and were the only group that never recovered to 2019 levels — the clearest place for organizations to act.
8.6x
+12%
-1.57
The career staircase flattens.
With none of the Triad capacities, wellbeing rose predictably with seniority. With all three, that gap closed — students and senior executives strong in all three showed the highest wellbeing of all, and career level largely stopped predicting who thrives.
A persistent structural barrier
Managers weren’t short on emotional intelligence — their scores were higher than employees’ and students’. They were short on the organizational support to use it, which is why the paper frames the manager transition as a “resource passageway” organizations can open or block by design.
Read the full paper: Freedman, Iseppato, Choi & Freedman (2026), Into the Headwinds, Frontiers in Psychology. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1848879
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