Holdership in practice: designing holding environments for innovation and organisational resilience

Purpose This paper introduces the concept of holdership as a psychoanalytically informed explanatory framework that reconceptualises leadership not as an individual role, behavior, or style, but as a distributed organisational holding function. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott's notion of the holding environment, the study explicates how organizations design and sustain relational, structural, and emotional conditions that regulate anxiety, support developmental progression, and enable innovation and organisational resilience under conditions of uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an integrative conceptual review approach explicitly oriented toward theory development rather than empirical aggregation or hypothesis testing. It synthesizes Winnicott's psychoanalytic concepts with contemporary leadership, organisational behavior, and organisational psychodynamics literatures. Through structured comparative analysis of established leadership perspectives and a theory-driven synthesis, the paper develops a multi-level conceptual model of holdership, articulates its developmental logic, and derives organisational design implications. Illustrative organisational examples are employed to support interpretive clarity rather than empirical validation. Findings The analysis advances holdership as a distributed, relational, and system-level holding function through which organizations enable the developmental movement from dependence to mature autonomy. By sustaining holding environments characterized by emotional containment, psychological safety, authenticity, and shared responsibility, organizations foster conditions conducive to learning, creativity, and innovation in complex and uncertain contexts. Innovation and resilience are thus conceptualized as emergent developmental outcomes rather than as leader-driven interventions or static capabilities. Practical implications The framework offers diagnostic and design-oriented guidance for leaders, executives, and HR professionals seeking to cultivate effective holding environments. Rather than prescribing idealized leader behaviors, it highlights organisational practices and arrangements, including empathy, emotional containment, shared decision-making, and developmental support, that enhance engagement, reduce turnover, and sustain resilient and innovative organisational cultures over time. Social implications By foregrounding emotionally attuned, inclusive, and non-heroic modes of organizing, the study contributes to debates on ethical leadership, sustainable use of power, and human-centered organisational design. Holdership supports healthier workplaces and strengthens collective capacity to respond creatively and responsibly to social, environmental, and institutional challenges in contemporary societies. Originality/value This study contributes to organisation and leadership theory by extending existing post-heroic and distributed leadership scholarship through a systemic and psychodynamic account of organising under uncertainty. By conceptualising leadership as an embedded organisational holding function, the paper introduces previously under-theorized mechanisms of anxiety regulation, emotional containment, and developmental support, offering a novel theoretical lens and a coherent set of actionable design principles for resilient, innovative, and humanly sustainable organizing.