Return-to-office fights and AI forecasts are loud. The quieter crisis is managerial fatigue. Global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, and the bill for lost productivity is about 10 trillion dollars, roughly 9 percent of world GDP (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement fell sharply as well, from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, with a nine-point slide since 2022 (Gallup, 2025). Telling people to be engaged while keeping decisions bottled up at the top is not a strategy. It is a design flaw.
The engagement crash is a design problem
Look at the spread between the median and the frontier. In best-practice organizations, 79 percent of managers report being engaged, almost four times the global average of 22 percent (Gallup, 2025). That gap is a reminder that context beats exhortation. Structure and norms, not pep talks, set the ceiling on energy and initiative. Treat engagement as an outcome of where power sits, how decisions are made, and whether teams can learn in public without fear.
One route is to decentralize more than messaging. Self-managing organizations are defined by a radical, formal redistribution of authority across the enterprise, removing the manager–subordinate relationship as the default mechanism of control (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The literature they synthesize is clear on the trade. Traditional hierarchy is good at reliable execution in stable conditions. It becomes rigid and status-bound when the work is nonroutine and crosses functions, the very terrain where knowledge has to move quickly and people need to develop. The claim is not that hierarchy never works. It is that complexity punishes bottlenecks.
Authority needs to travel with the work
There are many ways to move decisions closer to those who do the work without a full rewrite of the org chart. The principle is consistent with the self-management lens: distribute formal authority, specify decision rights, and remove the requirement to route every choice through a boss. That is the path to reduce load on overstretched managers and to surface talent that is presently filtered by rank. Lee and Edmondson (2017) are careful to frame their conclusions as a synthesis, not a universal prescription. That is the right caution. Start where complexity is highest and interdependence is real, not where compliance and repeatability matter most.
Decentralizing authority only works if people know how to reshape their own roles. Here the evidence is concrete. A meta-analysis of 14 job crafting interventions found small but significant gains: job crafting behaviors increased with a Hedges' g of 0.26, work engagement rose by 0.31, and contextual performance by 0.39 (Oprea et al., 2019). The performance effect came through engagement. Once you account for the engagement lift, crafting behaviors add no independent performance bump (Oprea et al., 2019). That is a design lesson. If you want output, build the conditions that lift engagement and teach people how to adjust their tasks, relationships, and thinking about their work. The meta-analysis also reports a wide confidence interval on contextual performance that begins at 0.01, so treat the effect as real but modest (Oprea et al., 2019). Even so, the utility analysis suggests material economic returns in healthcare settings, which implies these small gains compound in operational environments where turnover and coordination costs bite (Oprea et al., 2019).
Teach people to recraft the job
Job crafting is not a motivational poster. It is a set of practical moves employees can make to change task boundaries, interactions, and the meaning they ascribe to their work. The interventions reviewed by Oprea and colleagues show that when organizations teach these moves explicitly, engagement goes up and performance follows through that channel (Oprea et al., 2019). The mechanism matters for leaders with fiduciary goals. If engagement mediates performance, then the economic payoff comes from redesigning the experience of work, not from surveillance or more cascading goals.
Combine that with formal shifts in decision rights. For example, teams can own resource allocation within preset guardrails, set schedules that fit the work they actually face, and choose the methods they use to reach defined outcomes. Those are interpretive suggestions, but they fit the pattern described by Lee and Edmondson (2017): distribute authority where learning and cross-boundary problem solving matter most, and retain hierarchy where reliability is the priority.
Build the safety net for candor
Redistributing power without psychological safety invites silence. The classic field study that introduced team psychological safety found that teams that believed they could take interpersonal risks engaged in more learning behaviors, and that learning mediated the link to performance (Edmondson, 1999). The sample was 51 teams in a single manufacturing company and the design was cross-sectional, so treat the result as foundational theory backed by field observation rather than causal proof across industries. The practical implication stands. If you want people to speak up about process flaws or to propose new ways of working, they must expect that candor will not be punished.
This is the triad leaders control. First, move specific decisions to the edge, then make those rights visible in your operating system, not as a side letter. Second, teach job crafting as a skill so employees can shape the work they now own. Third, model and measure psychological safety so learning can convert empowerment into improved outcomes. The Gallup data show that when context changes, engagement can triple relative to the norm for managers. That is a structural lever, not a morale campaign (Gallup, 2025).
The practical move
You do not need a revolution to start. Pick one domain of complex work where cycle time is slowed by approvals. Transfer a few key decisions to the team that does the work, publish the boundaries, and let them decide how to meet the goal. Offer a short job crafting workshop that covers task, relational, and cognitive crafting. Then run a simple pulse on psychological safety and learning behaviors, using Edmondson's definition as your north star, and watch whether engagement and throughput move together over the next quarter (Edmondson, 1999; Oprea et al., 2019).
If manager engagement is falling while a minority of firms report four times the rate, the likely culprit is not a sudden global loss of work ethic. It is operating design. Give teams the reins where complexity demands it, equip them to shape their roles, and make speaking up routine. The talent you already have will look a lot better once the system stops getting in its way.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global engagement at 20 percent, a 10 trillion dollar productivity cost at 9 percent of GDP, and a sharp fall in manager engagement, with best-practice organizations showing 79 percent manager engagement. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Oprea, Barzin, Vîrgă, Iliescu & Rusu (2019). Effectiveness of job crafting interventions: a meta-analysis and utility analysis. Finds small but significant gains in job crafting, engagement, and contextual performance, with performance gains mediated by engagement and economic returns in healthcare. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1646728
- Lee & Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs as formal, radical decentralization of authority and synthesizes when hierarchy helps versus when it hinders complex, cross-functional problem solving. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Introduces team psychological safety and shows learning behavior mediates its link to performance in a field study of 51 teams in a single firm. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999