Return-to-office fights and AI forecasts suck up attention. Meanwhile a more immediate risk is spreading quietly through the middle of organizations. Manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, with the sharpest drop in the last year, from 27 percent to 22 percent, even as top-performing firms report 79 percent of managers engaged (Gallup, 2025). When the people who coordinate work, shape decisions, and buffer teams from churn check out, talent follows.
The solution is not a new slogan or another listening survey. It is a different job for managers. Shift them from gatekeepers of activity to designers of the conditions under which people do their best work: clarity of authority, psychological safety, and room for teams to recraft their tasks. The research case for this is consistent and actionable.
Make learning safer, then faster
Teams learn when it is safe to surface problems and test ideas. That is not a soft factor, it is a performance mechanism. In a field study of 51 work teams inside a single manufacturing company, Amy Edmondson found that psychological safety, defined as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, was associated with learning behavior, while team efficacy was not once safety was controlled. Learning behavior in turn mediated the link between safety and performance (Edmondson, 1999). The causal chain is instructive. Safety enables more information to surface, more experiments to run, and more adjustments to stick. Without it, people protect themselves and the system gets dumber.
Managerial implication: design routines that normalize candor and error correction. Publish team norms for speaking up, run brief after-action reviews on projects, and invite challenge on decisions. Do not confuse conviviality with safety. The test is whether people raise risks early and change course when the evidence shifts. Managers who create that climate are not ceding authority. They are building the only engine that adapts at the speed of the work.
Let people recraft the work on purpose
Most firms try to fix engagement with incentives or communications. A more direct lever is to change the work itself. Job crafting interventions teach employees to adjust task boundaries, relationships, or the meaning of their work. A meta-analysis of 14 intervention studies shows they reliably increase job crafting behaviors with a small effect size, and more important, they raise work engagement and contextual performance. The estimated effects are modest, with work engagement around g = 0.31 and contextual performance around g = 0.39, and the confidence interval for performance starts at 0.01. The performance effect is fully mediated by engagement, which means the path runs through how energized people feel about their work rather than the crafting behaviors alone (Oprea, Barzin, Vîrgă, Iliescu and Rusu, 2019). Utility analysis in that review indicates substantial economic returns for healthcare organizations.
Modest does not mean trivial. Small, reliable shifts at scale beat inspirational bursts that fade. The evidence also points managers to the right role. Their job is not to cheerlead creativity but to schedule structured job crafting, make it visible, and connect it to team goals. For example, run quarterly sessions where individuals map a week’s tasks, mark energy drains and value hotspots, and design micro-experiments to swap, streamline, or re-sequence work. Follow with a team-level review of what stuck. The aim is to move discretion closer to the work with guardrails, then make the learning social so it spreads.
How far to flatten and formalize
Some organizations go further and remove the boss role altogether. Self-managing organizations decentralize authority in a radical, formal, and systematic way, eliminating the manager–subordinate relationship and distributing decision rights across roles and processes (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The literature they synthesize is clear on the trade. Traditional managerial hierarchy is effective for reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments. It tends to inhibit complex, cross-boundary problem solving, can ossify under change, and often locks in status differences that hold back people’s development (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
That does not mean every firm should abolish managers. It does mean that when work is interdependent, uncertain, and fast-shifting, flattening decision rights and making them explicit is a better starting point than adding more layers. The distinctive lesson from self-managing organizations is less about ideology and more about formality. They do not rely on heroic culture. They write down who decides what, how work is proposed, how roles change, and how conflicts are resolved. Managers who act as system designers can borrow that discipline without going all the way to full self-management.
What to do next
A redesign of the manager’s job will not fix disengagement overnight. It will steadily improve the conditions under which talent stays and performs. Four moves point in the right direction:
- Publish a decision-rights map. For your unit, list the top ten recurring decisions and who owns them, who is consulted, and what thresholds trigger escalation. Remove approvals that add no risk protection. The signal to talent is simple: you are trusted to move.
- Institutionalize job crafting. Put two 90-minute job crafting sessions per quarter on the calendar. Tie experiments to team goals and report outcomes. This is how the small effect sizes in the job crafting evidence become material at scale (Oprea et al., 2019).
- Make learning visible. Run short, blameless after-action reviews at the end of projects. Track how many risks are raised early and what changes follow. You are building the mediating mechanism Edmondson identified, not a vibe (Edmondson, 1999).
- Flatten with formality. Where work is complex, shift decisions to those closest to the problem and codify the process. Borrow from the self-managing playbook by eliminating manager-as-gatekeeper roles and replacing them with clear role definitions, transparent commitments, and explicit escalation paths (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
The talent market will keep punishing ambiguity. The latest global snapshot shows how fragile the middle has become, with only 22 percent of managers engaged on average and a vast gap between common and best practice (Gallup, 2025). Treat that not as a morale problem but as a design brief. Redefine the manager’s job so teams can learn faster and craft better work. The outcome you want, engagement, turns up as a byproduct when the system changes. That is how you keep people, and how they keep the company moving.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports a drop in manager engagement to 22 percent and a wide gap to best-practice firms, framing engagement as a design problem. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Oprea, Barzin, Vîrgă, Iliescu and Rusu (2019). Effectiveness of job crafting interventions: a meta-analysis and utility analysis. Finds small but reliable gains in job crafting, engagement, and contextual performance, with performance mediated by engagement and economic returns in healthcare. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2019.1646728
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Shows that psychological safety predicts team learning behaviors, which mediate performance, grounding the argument for managers to build safe learning climates. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines SMOs and synthesizes when hierarchy helps or hinders, supporting the case for clearer, distributed decision rights. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059