Propagation, not aggregation: linking individual psychological flexibility to organizational functioning

Individual psychological flexibility is reliably associated with worker health, and interventions that raise it improve how individuals fare; yet such interventions do not reliably change the organizations those individuals belong to. This paper takes that disparity as its starting point and argues that the missing link is propagation rather than production: organizational flexibility is not the aggregate of flexible individuals but a pattern of coordinated, values-consistent action that is retained and spread across an organization, or absorbed and extinguished, depending on the conditions it meets. Integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the Prosocial approach, and a multilevel account of selection by consequences, the paper proposes a three-level model in which whether an increase in individual flexibility reaches the organizational level depends on two conditions: the leverage of the affected members over the consequences their colleagues encounter, and whether the surrounding culture reinforces or penalizes values-consistent action. Bond's emphasis on the flexibility of leaders is recovered as a high-leverage special case of this more general mechanism. The model is developed conceptually and yields a set of testable propositions, together with the measures their testing would require. Throughout, worker health is treated as a value worth pursuing in its own right rather than as an instrument of performance.