The Performance Paradox: When Pushing for Results Creates the Very Risk You're Trying to Manage

Dr Anna Kiaos  |  Mind Culture Life Australia  |  February 2026

Every leader I work with faces the same tension. They need their people to perform. They need results, accountability, targets met, standards maintained. At the same time, they’re being told — by regulators, by their own People and Culture teams, by the growing pile of workers’ compensation claims on their desk — that they need to manage psychosocial risk.

So they try to do both. Push hard, but also be supportive. Demand accountability, but also protect wellbeing. Set ambitious targets, but also make sure nobody gets hurt.

The problem is, most organisations are treating these as two separate tasks. Performance sits with operations. Psychosocial risk sits with HR or WHS. And nobody is looking at the place where they collide: the culture.

Performance Pressure Is Not the Problem

Let me be clear about something that often gets lost in this conversation. Expecting high performance from employees is not inherently harmful. People thrive when they’re challenged, when their work has purpose, when they’re held to standards that stretch them. Research consistently shows that meaningful demands, when accompanied by adequate resources and support, are associated with engagement, professional growth and job satisfaction.

The problem is not pressure. The problem is what happens to pressure when it passes through a culture that distorts it.

A target is just a number. What turns it into a psychosocial hazard is the culture that surrounds it — how it’s communicated, what happens when it isn’t met, and what people learn they have to sacrifice to achieve it.

In one organisation I assessed, a division had aggressive but not unreasonable KPIs. The numbers themselves weren’t the issue. The issue was that the culture had learned, through years of informal signals, that missing a target meant public humiliation in team meetings.

People weren’t afraid of the target. They were afraid of the consequence of failing and that fear had reshaped how the entire team operated — information hoarding, blame shifting, quiet disengagement. The psychosocial injury didn’t come from the demand. It came from the culture that had grown around it.

The Invisible Mechanism

This is where most organisations get stuck. They look at performance and psychosocial risk as a balancing act — push hard on one side, cushion on the other. But culture doesn’t work like a set of scales. It works like a pressure system.

When leaders increase performance expectations, that pressure doesn’t distribute evenly. It follows the existing cultural channels. It concentrates in subcultures where norms around overwork, silence or self-sacrifice are already established. It bypasses the teams that have the psychological safety to push back and lands hardest on the teams that don’t.

This is what the Culture Pressure Map is designed to make visible. When I go into an organisation and map how pressure moves through its culture, the pattern is almost never what leadership expects. The division they thought was fine is quietly fracturing. The team they were worried about has a strong subculture of mutual support that’s absorbing the pressure. The real risk is sitting in the microcultures no one is paying attention to — the night shift, the regional office, the team whose manager left six months ago and was never properly replaced.

The Aftermath Problem

Here is where the paradox gets expensive. Most organisations only engage with psychosocial risk after the damage is done. Someone lodges a claim. A team collapses. A SafeWork inspector arrives. And then the response is reactive — an investigation, a mediation, a wellbeing program, an EAP referral.

None of this addresses the culture that produced the harm. It addresses the individual who was harmed. It treats the symptom and leaves the system intact.

I see this pattern repeatedly across sectors. A government agency restructures, creates enormous uncertainty and workload pressure and then offers resilience training to the people absorbing that pressure. A mining company runs FIFO rosters that fragment family life and erode identity, and then provides a counselling hotline. A healthcare organisation demands emotional labour from clinicians operating in understaffed teams, and then wonders why its EAP utilisation is climbing.

You cannot counsel people out of a cultural problem. The injury is not a deficiency in the individual. It is a consequence of the system they are working inside.

What Getting the Balance Right Actually Looks Like

The phrase “getting the balance right” implies a trade-off — as if you have to choose between performance and psychological safety. You don’t. But you do have to understand that the relationship between them runs through your culture, and if you’re not examining the culture, you’re managing blind.

First, stop separating performance conversations from psychosocial risk conversations.

They are the same conversation. The way you pursue performance is either creating psychosocial risk or mitigating it. Every leadership behaviour, every team norm, every unwritten rule about what gets rewarded and what gets punished is shaping both outcomes simultaneously.

Second, look at the culture, not just the metrics. Engagement surveys will tell you people are disengaged. They won’t tell you why. Incident reports will tell you someone was injured. They won’t tell you what cultural conditions made that injury inevitable. You need methods that examine how work is actually being experienced — the informal norms, the social dynamics, the unspoken expectations. This requires qualitative, ethnographic approaches, not just dashboards and pulse checks.

Third, diagnose before you intervene. The most common mistake I see is organisations implementing solutions before they understand the problem. They roll out a mental health strategy, a leadership development program, a new set of values — all without first identifying where the cultural pressure is actually sitting. The intervention doesn’t match the problem because nobody mapped the problem first.

Fourth, make it evidence-based. Leaders need more than a feeling that something is off. They need diagnostic evidence that identifies specific cultural mechanisms creating risk, so they can act with precision rather than guessing. This is also their due diligence story. If they’re ever challenged on whether they proactively managed psychosocial hazards, they need to be able to point to a structured assessment, clear findings and documented action.

The Real Risk Is Not Knowing

Under Australian WHS legislation, officers have a positive duty to exercise due diligence in managing psychosocial hazards. That duty is not discharged by having policies on paper or an EAP contract in a drawer. It requires a genuine understanding of what is happening inside the organisation.

The organisations that get this right are not the ones that stop pushing for performance. They are the ones that have the courage to look honestly at what their culture is doing to the people inside it. They assess where pressure is building. They identify which cultural norms are protective and which are harmful. They intervene with precision rather than platitudes.

And they do all of this before someone gets hurt, not after.

High performance and psychological safety are not opposites. They are both products of culture. And if you are not examining your culture, you are not managing either one.

Dr Anna Kiaos is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia and a researcher at the University of New South Wales, Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. She works with government agencies, healthcare organisations and private enterprise to identify where cultural pressure is creating psychosocial risk — and what to do about it.

To book a confidential conversation about your organisation, visit mindculturelife.com.au