Relational–emotional Foundations of Employee Thriving: a Systematic Review of Leadership Capabilities and Emotional Agility

This systematic review discusses how inclusive and ethical leadership practices facilitate employee thriving as a function of relational and emotional processes such as psychological safety, meaning, and emotional agility. Following the PRISMA guidelines, 44 empirical studies indexed between 2006 and 2025 in top-tier Scopus and Web of Science-indexed journals were systematically analyzed with a focus on mediating processes and conditional boundaries between leadership and thriving. Results showed that a dual-engine model of thriving includes how inclusive and ethical leadership generates psychological safety, sense of belonging, value congruence, and empowerment processes sustained indirectly by emotional agility and psychological flexibility as intrapersonal engines. For thriving to emerge maximally, there is a need for convergence between opportunity (fairness / inclusion / psychological safety) and capacity (emotional agility or moral self-efficacy) and clarity (structural consistency or task interdependency) dimensions. From this systematic review, there is support that emotional agility is still a theoretical blind spot for the intervening role it takes to strengthen the transformational processes between supportive leadership and sustainable forms of high adaptive functioning. From a practice-based position, there is a need to mainstream inclusive and ethical leadership as strategic tools to improve well-being and performance. This is done through efforts to place psychological safety and ethical authenticity and value-aligned communication principles as critical considerations in training ethical leaders. ACT-based micro-learning programs and reflection-based training would be highly applicable to improve thriving climates. This systematic review provides the first empirical link between theories of inclusive and ethical leadership to the emotional agility framework to explain thriving at work.