Return-to-office mandates make headlines, but the quieter story is more fundamental: people are disengaging and managers are running out of rope. Gallup reports global engagement at 20 percent in 2025, the lowest since 2020, with an estimated cost of 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, about 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022 to 22 percent, even as best-practice organizations reach 79 percent among managers, a gap that Gallup frames as a design problem rather than a cycle problem (Gallup, 2025). If organizations are flattening, whether by necessity or design, schools, universities, and corporate academies have a choice. Keep teaching people to wait for instructions, or teach them to run without a boss.
The case for self-directed learning is no longer theoretical
Self-directed education is not a vibe. It sits on a research program that specifies the psychological conditions for internal motivation and skill growth. Self-determination theory (SDT) identifies three basic needs in learning contexts: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. A new meta-analysis synthesizes 36 SDT-based educational interventions with 11,976 participants, selected via PRISMA from 505 records across nine databases. It is the first systematic review in over a decade to cover all three needs, going beyond the earlier review that examined only autonomy support (Wang et al., 2024). Crucially, the study explicitly tests whether SDT interventions in education are effective, rather than assuming they are (Wang et al., 2024). That matters for leaders who must justify design shifts with evidence, not slogans.
The practical read is straightforward. If you want learners to act with initiative, design for choice and clarity in how they pursue work. If you want them to stick with hard tasks, calibrate challenges so that effort yields visible progress. If you want them to learn with and from others, engineer belonging in the group. The evidence base has matured enough that these are not abstract values. They are design levers under active empirical scrutiny (Wang et al., 2024).
Safety is not softness, it is the engine of learning
Even with autonomy and structure in place, people will not take intellectual risks if they fear embarrassment or punishment. Psychological safety gives them permission to try, ask, and correct. In a seminal field study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company, team psychological safety was associated with learning behavior, whereas team efficacy was not when safety was controlled. Learning behavior mediated the link between safety and performance (Edmondson, 1999). The study is cross-sectional and single-firm, so it does not prove causation across all settings, but it established the construct and its importance for how teams actually learn (Edmondson, 1999).
Translate that to classrooms or corporate cohorts. If people think a question will be held against them, they will optimize for impression management, not growth. If the group shares a belief that interpersonal risk is acceptable, experimentation becomes routine. Psychological safety is not an icebreaker or a poster. It is a norm you can observe: do people surface errors quickly, request help early, and give candid peer feedback without social penalty?
What organizations without bosses can teach schools with them
There is a second, contemporary reason to take self-directed education seriously. The frontier of organizing is already testing what happens when you remove the traditional manager-subordinate relationship. Self-managing organizations decentralize authority formally and systematically, eliminating the direct boss role across the company (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The management literature they synthesize is clear on the trade-off. Hierarchy is good at reliable execution of known tasks in stable conditions. It is less good at complex, cross-functional problem solving, it tends to rigidity, and it amplifies status differences that stifle development (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). This is a theoretical synthesis, not a randomized trial, but the implications are plain.
If firms are shifting work to teams that coordinate laterally and make more decisions at the edge, then education that assumes a manager will translate goals, monitor progress, and correct course is out of date. The capability to self-manage must be practiced long before someone is handed a project with ambiguous scope. That practice looks a lot like SDT: structured autonomy with accountability, robust feedback to build competence, and peer bonds strong enough to talk about work honestly. It also looks like psychological safety in action: the social permission to propose, test, and revise without fear of humiliation.
Design moves leaders can make now
- Trade some control for clarity. Replace step-by-step directives with clear outcomes, criteria for quality, and constraints. Give learners options in process or topic within those guardrails. This is consistent with autonomy support in SDT, which recent interventions explicitly test in educational settings (Wang et al., 2024).
- Build competence with visible progress. Calibrate tasks so effort produces feedback that learners can act on quickly. Pair novices with peers for micro-teaches that reinforce skill and confidence. Competence support is a core SDT need under meta-analytic review, not a nice-to-have (Wang et al., 2024).
- Make belonging operational. Establish peer routines that normalize help-seeking and error-sharing. In team settings, psychological safety is associated with learning behavior and, through it, performance. The construct is grounded in field data, even if that evidence comes from a single firm and time (Edmondson, 1999).
- Teach people to run meetings without a host. Rotate roles like facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe. In self-managing organizations, authority is distributed by design, and routines replace supervision. That is a teachable skill set, not a personality trait (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
- Measure what you value. If engagement is a board-level concern, treat it as a design variable, as the gap between average and best-practice organizations suggests. Survey evidence cannot prove causation, but the 79 percent manager engagement figure in high-performing organizations shows what is possible when systems are built for it (Gallup, 2025).
The risk in self-directed education is not chaos. It is pretending that tomorrow’s work can be done by people trained to wait. The alternative is both humane and hard-nosed. Design learning environments that satisfy the basic needs that drive motivation, create the social safety that enables inquiry, and simulate the distributed decision rights of modern firms. That is how you grow contributors who do not need a manager to do their best work, which is exactly what many organizations now require.
Sources
- Wang et al. (2024). SDT-based educational interventions: a meta-analysis, Learning and Motivation 87. Synthesizes 36 interventions with 11,976 participants and is the first systematic review in over a decade to cover autonomy, competence, and relatedness, explicitly testing effectiveness. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0023969024000572
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly 44. In a field study of 51 teams in one firm, team psychological safety was associated with learning behavior, which mediated its link to performance. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing, Research in Organizational Behavior 37. Defines self-managing organizations and synthesizes evidence on when hierarchy helps or hinders complex problem solving and development. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20 percent, a 10 trillion dollar productivity cost at about 9 percent of global GDP, and a nine-point drop in manager engagement since 2022, with best-practice firms at 79 percent. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx