Employee Motivation Rarely Disappears. Usually, It Is Managed Out of the Organization

A manager once came to me with a question that sounded perfectly reasonable.

He had been working for the same company for about three and a half years and could no longer find the motivation he once had. Getting out of bed had become harder. Meetings drained rather than energized him. He still did his job, but the curiosity and drive he had brought to it were slowly disappearing.

He had already developed his own explanation. Years earlier, someone had told him that you should never stay in the same position for more than four years. Perhaps his motivation was simply warning him that it was time to move on. Maybe he should update his LinkedIn profile, call a recruiter and start applying for another job.

It was plausible.

It was also wrong.

During our conversation, a very different picture emerged. The company had grown rapidly. In the early years, he had been given room to act. When he saw a problem, he solved it. When he saw an opportunity, he could pursue it. He was expected to think, decide and take responsibility.

That freedom had gradually disappeared.

As the organization grew, around a dozen HR managers had been hired. Roles were defined, responsibilities were divided, procedures were introduced and decision-making authority was carefully documented. What had once been a living organization increasingly became a collection of job descriptions, approval structures and processes.

Even relatively small decisions were critically reviewed by the two founders.

Improvements were still everywhere, but whenever the manager submitted a proposal, the response was usually the same:

“Leave it alone. This is how we have always done it.”

After hearing that often enough, most intelligent people eventually stop proposing anything.

“If you reject every initiative and then wonder why employees show no ownership, you have not discovered a motivation problem. You have created one.”

This manager had not suddenly become lazy. His personality had not radically changed after three and a half years. He had not reached some natural expiration date in his job.

The organization had slowly removed the conditions that once allowed him to care.

His motivation had not expired after four years

The idea that people should change jobs every three or four years sounds attractive because it gives a simple explanation for a complicated feeling. If work no longer energizes you, perhaps you have simply stayed too long.

Sometimes that is true. People develop, interests change and a role that once fitted can become too small. Personal circumstances, health, relationships and changing ambitions can also affect motivation. Self-confidence, optimism and emotional stability can influence how someone responds to difficulty, uncertainty and disappointment at work.

But personality does not operate in isolation.

A highly motivated person can become passive in a system that repeatedly punishes initiative. A creative person can become careful when every unconventional idea attracts criticism. A responsible manager can stop taking responsibility when every decision is second-guessed by people higher in the hierarchy.

In that environment, demotivation is not a mysterious personal defect. It is a logical response.

The manager I coached had originally joined an entrepreneurial organization. He now worked inside a controlled administrative system. His job title had remained more or less the same, but the psychological reality of his work had fundamentally changed.

The role still existed.

His freedom within it did not.

How growth turns adults into job descriptions

Growth creates complexity. More employees require clearer communication, financial controls, legal safeguards and some agreement about who is responsible for what. No serious organization can function on complete improvisation.

But clarity can easily turn into confinement.

HR departments play an important role in that process. The profession is largely designed around defining roles, documenting responsibilities, managing risks, measuring competencies and creating consistent procedures. From an administrative perspective, that makes sense.

From a human perspective, it can become suffocating.

A person arrives with judgement, curiosity, experience, intuition, ambition, frustration, imagination and a desire to contribute. HR translates that person into a function profile, a competency matrix, a performance cycle and a position in an organizational chart.

Something is inevitably lost in that translation.

People are not Human Resources.

Oil is a resource. Capital is a resource. A computer is a resource. Human beings are not interchangeable components waiting to be allocated efficiently. Yet the language already reveals the underlying assumption. Once people are described as resources, treating them as manageable production units starts to sound normal.

This way of thinking is not new. It has deep roots in the industrial history of management. Frederick Winslow Taylor approached work as an engineer looking at a machine. Tasks had to be divided, standardized, measured and controlled so that workers could produce more predictable results. I explain that history more extensively in The History of Why Management Is So Wrong and Frederick Taylor.

Taylor’s ideas were developed for an industrial world in which large groups of relatively unskilled workers performed repetitive physical tasks. More than a century later, many organizations still use the same fundamental logic to manage highly educated professionals whose value depends on judgement, creativity, initiative and human interaction.

We ask people to think and then design a system that rewards them for following instructions.

We ask for entrepreneurship and then require five approvals before they can spend a small amount of money.

We ask for innovation and then tell them:

“Leave it alone. This is how we have always done it.”

That is not a motivation mystery. It is organizational cause and effect.

What research tells us about motivation at work

The difference between personal motivation and organizational conditions has been studied extensively.

One of the most influential perspectives is Self-Determination Theory. In their work on motivation in organizations, Marylène Gagné and Edward Deci describe three basic psychological needs that strongly influence autonomous motivation:

• Autonomy: experiencing meaningful choice and influence over how you perform your work.

• Competence: feeling capable and having opportunities to improve, learn and contribute.

• Relatedness: feeling connected to other people and experiencing that you belong.

These needs are not fashionable employee benefits. They are psychological conditions that affect how people engage with their work.

A 2026 meta-analysis of 192 studies found consistent relationships between support for these psychological needs, autonomous motivation and positive workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction, work engagement, well-being and productive functioning. It also found negative relationships with maladaptive outcomes.

That does not mean autonomy automatically produces excellent performance or that every employee should be allowed to do whatever they want. Autonomy is not the absence of expectations, accountability or direction. It means that adults experience enough influence to use their own judgement within clear boundaries.

The manager in my coaching practice had responsibility on paper but decreasing autonomy in reality. He was accountable for outcomes while being denied meaningful influence over how those outcomes could be achieved.

That combination is particularly destructive.

Research into work design makes the same point from another direction. A large meta-analysis by Stephen Humphrey, Jennifer Nahrgang and Frederick Morgeson combined 259 studies involving 219,625 participants. The researchers examined motivational, social and contextual characteristics of work.

Across the studies, 14 work characteristics together explained an average of 43 percent of the variance in relevant employee attitudes and behaviour. Motivational work characteristics explained approximately 34 percent of the variance in job satisfaction and 25 percent of the variance in subjective performance.

Those are not marginal effects.

The way work is designed materially influences how people experience and perform it. Variety, significance, autonomy, feedback, social support and opportunities to use different skills all matter.

That is why autonomy can increase motivation and well-being. It allows people to experience themselves as participants in the work rather than obedient operators of someone else’s system.

Purpose and belonging need to be experienced

Purpose is often presented as the cure for employee disengagement. A new purpose statement is written, a campaign is launched and the values appear on walls, websites and presentation slides.

But purpose printed on a wall cannot compensate for powerlessness experienced every day.

A sense of meaning and significance in work can contribute to intrinsic motivation, but only when employees can see and experience the connection between their work and that larger purpose.

Research among 462 working adults found that autonomy, competence and relatedness were associated with meaningful work and positive career outcomes. People are more likely to experience their work as meaningful when they can act, contribute, develop and feel connected to others. Meaning is therefore not merely a personal belief. It is influenced by the way an organization allows people to participate.

The same applies to belonging.

Employees do not feel connected because the company organizes a summer barbecue or publishes photographs of a diverse team. Connectedness develops when people feel heard, taken seriously and valued for more than the output of their role.

A company may speak beautifully about its mission while making employees feel that their judgement is unwanted. That contradiction eventually becomes visible.

Purpose without influence becomes corporate communication.

Belonging without trust becomes theatre.

A work environment that promotes purpose and connectedness can strengthen motivation. But leaders cannot outsource that environment to HR. It is created in everyday decisions, meetings and responses.

What happens when an employee challenges an established method?

What happens when someone admits a mistake?

What happens when a manager proposes an improvement?

What happens when an employee disagrees with one of the founders?

The honest answers tell you much more about the culture than the company values on the website. A culture can easily develop into competition, status and internal rivalry, even while the organization publicly talks about collaboration and shared purpose.

Salary and status cannot repair lost autonomy

Salary matters. People need to pay their mortgage, support their families and feel fairly compensated for what they contribute. Low or unfair pay can understandably destroy commitment.

But higher pay does not automatically restore intrinsic motivation.

External rewards can encourage a particular behaviour. A bonus may make someone work harder toward a measurable target. A promotion may increase status. Recognition can make people feel appreciated. None of that is inherently wrong.

Problems arise when rewards are used to compensate for work that has been emptied of autonomy, meaning or trust.

A larger bonus does not make constant micromanagement feel like freedom. A more impressive title does not repair the experience of never being heard. A company car does not make pointless procedures meaningful.

Status may even make the situation more confusing. Someone can look successful from the outside while feeling increasingly powerless inside the organization. The title says director. The daily experience says functionary who needs permission.

Work pressure has a similar dual effect. Challenging work can increase motivation when people feel competent, supported and able to influence how they meet the challenge. Pressure can provide energy and focus.

But when too much is never enough, pressure becomes destructive. If employees face unrealistic demands while having little control over the work, stress increases and quality declines. People start completing tasks to survive the week rather than because they care about the result.

Eventually, management may interpret that survival behaviour as a poor attitude.

Motivation is a boardroom responsibility

A board cannot inject intrinsic motivation into employees. Motivation is not a liquid that senior management can order HR to pour into the organization.

The board can, however, create the conditions in which motivation survives.

It decides how much control managers exercise. It decides whether employees are trusted. It determines how many approval layers exist, how leaders respond to criticism and whether initiative is rewarded or quietly punished.

It also decides what role HR is allowed to play.

If HR primarily protects procedures, enforces role boundaries and reduces every human issue to policy, it becomes part of the demotivation machinery. If it helps remove unnecessary barriers, protects human dignity and gives people room to grow, it can contribute positively.

But HR should never become a separate management reality that hides the board’s responsibility.

When an entire team loses initiative, the people at the top should not immediately ask what is wrong with the employees. They should examine the organization they have created.

“People usually do not need to be motivated. The board mainly needs to stop professionally organizing their motivation out of the company.” Ben Steenstra

That requires uncomfortable honesty.

Leaders may discover that the control they consider necessary is experienced as distrust. The consistency they celebrate may have become rigidity. The processes introduced to support growth may now prevent the organization from thinking.

They may also discover that employees stopped sharing ideas because leaders taught them that sharing ideas was pointless.

Good feedback and recognition matter, but feedback must work in both directions. An organization cannot expect employees to accept continuous evaluation while the founders and directors make themselves unreachable.

If leaders cannot tolerate criticism, employees learn to remain silent.

Silence may look like agreement for a while.

Eventually, it becomes detachment.

What the manager actually needed

The manager who came to me did not primarily need a new job. He needed to understand what had changed.

Once he saw that his demotivation was connected to the loss of autonomy, influence and trust, his situation became clearer. He could stop treating himself as the problem and start making deliberate choices.

He could discuss his mandate with the founders. He could identify which decisions genuinely required approval and which controls had simply accumulated over time. He could ask whether his experience and judgement were still wanted.

He could also decide that the organization had changed into a place where he no longer belonged.

Leaving may still become the right decision. But there is an important difference between leaving because you believe something is wrong with your motivation and leaving because the company no longer allows you to contribute as the person it originally hired.

The first makes you doubt yourself.

The second gives you clarity.

For the organization, his story should have been a warning. When capable managers become quieter, stop proposing improvements and begin looking for another job, the loss starts long before their final working day.

Their knowledge remains in the building, but their commitment has already left.

A team workshop may help expose these patterns, but only if the board is willing to examine its own behaviour. Another engagement survey, motivation program or HR process will achieve very little when leaders refuse to reconsider the system itself.

Employee motivation is not simply the employee’s responsibility.

When several capable people lose their energy inside the same organization, responsibility moves upward.

All the way to the boardroom.