I find this fascinating.
If we were to look at this from a story perspective, it breaks down into two camps.
People who think humans are stupid and some strong man will need to make the hard choices, and those who think you should level with people and ask them to come up with a solution, or make the sacrifices.
Here's the two factors to consider from a psychological POV. How long has the group been together, therefore, how well do they get along?
How large the group?
The Dunbar empathy limit is the main factor here. If your group has formed a social unit, then people are only capable of giving a shit about so many people. 1 death a tragedy, 1 million a statistic. But at what point does it flip?
The DEL.
It a bad situation like a zombie apocalypse, I would require the group to split when it reached 100 to 150. I'd prefer 25 to be max size, but a cushion is needed. Not just so the group doesn't all die because of one idiot, but because it is easier to sell everyone out, the larger the group.
As it progressed, I'd move to 25 man cells to a 10 man minimum, with the cells allowed to expand to 75 before mandating a split. Splitting being considered at 50.
The more cells, the more people can move around due to personality conflicts.
There would be a military structure with a elected civilian representative. All things survival are on the command structure, with everything else up to the elected civilian.
However, above that would be me.
I would make another organization along the lines of a commisar. They would be rotated among groups on a regular basis so they don't get comfortable. They would be the ones to make sure that people don't get stupid.
Because people will get stupid.
Drama, power struggles, some idiot thinking we can go mad max. Red pill idiots wanting to go all alpha, or left leaning morons wanting to go communist.
Society works best with a mix and a willingness to change to conditions. Yes, I'm arrogant enough to think I know better than most. Usually I'm right. I think in my case I was a dopamine addict and know the signs of power madness. I think I could keep it in check. That would be your biggest problem.
Power is addictive and addiction leads to corruption. If your leader gets addicted to power, yer screwed. Don't care how good he is, addiction always corrupts.
What really sours me from the moral high horse characters is the fact that there is almost always an asspull enabling them to continue with their unfeasible approach. If there were consequences to their seemingly impossible choices then it wouldn't be so bad, but almost none of the authors want to have those ugly consequences of having an mc making illogical decisions based on their morals and feelings. They either somehow always pull through and achieve what they wish the reality to be, or they are never subjected to situations where they must make hard choices in the first place just so they can go on along with how they have been, it just feels so nonsensical. Those who face consequences, and learn from them, is quite rare. That's why i tend to stay away from such goody moral high horse characters in most settings. So few of them are done well that, i just don't even wanna bother trying...
I've seen a bunch like this. HOTD is like that. Japanese has no problem letting their MCs fail.