Critical Followership, Cognitive Delay, and a Quantum Probability-Based Account of Trust

Introduction: The Problem Is Not Blind Obedience—It Is Premature Certainty

Much of the literature on leadership failure begins with a familiar diagnosis: followers obey when they should resist. This framing is intuitively appealing, but analytically incomplete. It treats obedience as a terminal moral condition—something followers are—rather than as the outcome of a cognitive and social process unfolding under pressure. In my earlier work on critical followership, I argued that followership is not passive compliance but an active...