A stubborn fact should focus every debate about talent. Only one in five workers worldwide reports being engaged, and the shortfall costs roughly 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement is sliding as well, down to 22% in 2025 from 27% a year earlier, a signal that the middle of many organizations is fraying (Gallup, 2025). If companies expect initiative and judgment, they must stop treating autonomy as a perk and start cultivating it as a skill. That cultivation begins in how people are taught, not in how they are monitored.
What the motivation science is testing now
For years, most discussions of student motivation fixated on a single tactic: be more “supportive.” The underlying theory was stronger than the practice. Self-determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs that underpin internal motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Until recently, evidence on interventions that targeted all three at once was scattered.
That gap is now being addressed. Wang and colleagues synthesized 36 full-text intervention studies with 11,976 participants, selected via a PRISMA process from 505 deduplicated records across nine databases, in what they note is the first systematic review in more than a decade to cover all three needs together (Wang et al., 2024). The meta-analysis, published in Learning and Motivation (vol. 87), explicitly tests whether self-determination theory interventions are effective at improving outcomes such as intrinsic motivation, building on earlier work that focused largely on autonomy support alone (Wang et al., 2024). The important point for leaders is not an effect size to quote, it is the design logic: when learning environments are built to support autonomy, to build competence with clear feedback, and to deepen relatedness, they are testing for the very conditions that make self-direction possible.
This is relevant far beyond classrooms. Employers who complain that graduates wait to be told what to do are describing a design problem. If people have practiced agency, mastery, and social connection in how they learn, they are better prepared to practice those same capacities at work. The reverse is also true.
What self-management actually requires
Many firms are experimenting with fewer layers and more local decision rights. The research language for this is “self-managing organizations.” Lee and Edmondson define these as organizations that decentralize authority in a radical, formal, systematic way across the whole company, and, crucially, that eliminate the conventional manager–subordinate relationship (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). Their synthesis is clear about where traditional hierarchy is strong and where it is brittle. In stable settings with known tasks, managerial hierarchy delivers reliable execution. When work shifts to complex, nonroutine problems that cut across functions, the same structure tends toward rigidity, status differences that mute learning, and slower adaptation (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
This implies a simple preparation question. If the work you expect people to do is judgment-heavy and collaborative across boundaries, training them to wait for permission is a poor rehearsal. Self-directed education, by contrast, asks people to set goals, manage trade-offs, and own consequences in a social setting. That is the daily life of a self-managing team.
The climate that makes self-direction viable
Autonomy without safety is theater. People will not ask naive questions, raise concerns, or admit uncertainty if they expect a social penalty. Edmondson’s foundational field study of 51 teams in a manufacturing company put a name and a measure to this problem. She defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, then showed that psychological safety was associated with learning behavior in teams. Team efficacy, by contrast, did not predict learning once psychological safety was accounted for. Crucially, learning behavior mediated the link between psychological safety and performance (Edmondson, 1999).
The mechanism matters for both schools and firms. If you want people to direct their own learning, you must normalize the behaviors that make learning visible: speaking up, testing ideas, surfacing mistakes early. That requires explicit norms, routines, and leadership signals that asking for help is not a weakness. No amount of autonomy talk substitutes for a climate where people can try, fail, and iterate without fear of humiliation.
A 2020s reading, and what to do next
The engagement slump is a systems signal, not a motivation deficit in individuals. With only 20% of workers engaged and the bill running near 10 trillion dollars, the status quo is too expensive to defend (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement falling nine points since 2022 suggests that the very people asked to translate strategy into daily work are saturated (Gallup, 2025). Flattening structures will not fix that on their own. They raise the bar on self-direction.
Here is a short design brief that follows directly from the evidence:
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Build around the three needs. Whether you run a school, a bootcamp, or a corporate academy, design learning experiences that explicitly support autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The current research agenda is testing SDT-based interventions at scale across these needs, which is exactly the right question to ask if you want durable motivation rather than compliance (Wang et al., 2024).
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Treat safety as the gate to learning. Make psychological safety a standing item, not an afterthought. Use structured turn-taking, debriefs that name process as well as content, and leader behaviors that model uncertainty. The field evidence links safety to learning behavior, and learning behavior to performance (Edmondson, 1999).
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Give people practice with real decision rights. If your strategy calls for self-managing teams, make the practice real. Start with nonroutine, cross-functional problems where hierarchy’s advantages are weakest, and clarify who holds what authority so that decentralization is not theater (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
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Read engagement as design feedback. When manager engagement drops from 27% to 22% in a year, something in the job design or context is broken. Use that signal to revisit workload, autonomy, and the learning climate that managers both experience and create for others (Gallup, 2025).
The practical implication is direct. If you expect people to own outcomes in flatter organizations, you must teach them, early and often, how to own their learning. That means curricula and corporate programs that cultivate autonomy, build competence with transparent feedback, deepen relatedness, and install psychological safety as infrastructure. The alternative is to keep paying for disengagement while wishing for initiative that your systems never taught.
Sources
- Wang et al. (2024). SDT-based educational interventions: a meta-analysis, Learning and Motivation 87. Synthesizes 36 intervention studies with 11,976 participants and tests whether autonomy, competence, and relatedness-supportive designs improve intrinsic motivation and related outcomes, grounding how to build self-directed learning. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0023969024000572
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing, Research in Organizational Behavior. Defines self-managing organizations and explains where hierarchy helps and where it hinders complex, cross-functional problem solving, clarifying the skills self-directed education should build. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly 44. Introduces team psychological safety and shows it relates to learning behavior, which mediates performance, making a case for safety as a prerequisite for self-directed learning. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20 percent, about 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, and a drop in manager engagement from 27 percent to 22 percent, framing the cost of not cultivating autonomy and learning at scale. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx