Manager Engagement Is Falling. Here Is Why That Should Worry Every Leadership Team.
Introduction
The most engaged group in most organizations used to be the managers. That is no longer true, and the newest data shows exactly why that shift is costing organizations more than most leadership teams realize.
For years, managers occupied a specific and reassuring position in workplace engagement data. They were, on average, meaningfully more engaged than the people they led. It made intuitive sense. Managers had more autonomy, clearer visibility into the organization's direction, and a stronger sense of ownership over outcomes. Gallup called this gap the engagement premium, and it functioned as something organizations could quietly count on: whatever else was happening lower in the organization, the people responsible for leading day-to-day teams were, at minimum, holding steady.
That premium has essentially vanished. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points, with the steepest single-year decline landing between 2024 and 2025, when it fell five points in a single year alone. Managers are now, for the first time in the history of Gallup's tracking, only about as engaged as the individual contributors they lead. The group organizations have always counted on to hold the line is no longer holding it, and the consequences of that shift are not staying contained to the managers experiencing it.
Why this is not simply another engagement statistic
Global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, and the world's second consecutive year of decline, something Gallup has never recorded before in back-to-back years. That decline cost the global economy an estimated 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, roughly 9 percent of global GDP. Those numbers alone would be significant on their own. What makes them considerably more urgent is where the sharpest deterioration is concentrated.
Gallup's research has consistently found that managers account for approximately 70 percent of the variance in team-level engagement. That statistic has functioned for years as one of the clearest and most actionable findings in workplace research: if you want to move the needle on how engaged a team is, the manager is the highest-leverage point of intervention available. The same finding that made investing in managers so promising now makes their disengagement so consequential. When the variable responsible for 70 percent of a team's engagement starts declining itself, the effect does not stay isolated. It travels directly into every team that manager leads.
What is actually driving the decline
The causes behind this shift are structural rather than incidental. Organizational flattening, the elimination of management layers that has accelerated across many industries, has concentrated more responsibility onto fewer managers, each now overseeing larger spans of control than before. Recent Gallup research on team size found that manager engagement declines as spans of control grow, a pattern that helps explain some of the sharpest regional drops in the newest data.
Reductions in middle management compound this further. Firstup's August 2025 research found that having fewer direct managers puts direct pressure on workplace communication, productivity, and employee experience, because frontline employees depend on their direct manager as the primary source of company information, clarity, and support. Employees in organizations that have gone through recent layoffs consistently report that their managers seem stretched thin and less accessible than before, a perception that is not simply about morale. It reflects an actual, measurable reduction in the manager's capacity to do the parts of the role, coaching, communication, individual attention, that engagement most depends on.
The pressure is not evenly distributed. Younger managers under 35 and female managers have experienced the steepest declines in both engagement and wellbeing, a pattern consistent across the newest reporting and suggestive of a leadership pipeline under particular strain precisely among the people organizations most need to retain and develop for the future.
The cascade effect leadership teams cannot afford to ignore
The most important finding in this research is not the decline itself. It is what the decline does to everything downstream of it. Countries and organizations with lower levels of manager engagement consistently report lower team engagement across every industry studied, a pattern Gallup describes as global and structurally consistent rather than isolated to specific companies or sectors.
This cascade extends well beyond morale. New initiatives that depend on managerial follow-through struggle to move from planning into genuine execution when the managers responsible for reinforcing them are themselves disengaged. Without active managerial reinforcement, employees revert quickly to old ways of working, and organizational change efforts that required significant investment stall or fail to deliver the impact they were designed to produce. Performance slows. Employee trust erodes. Turnover risk increases, not because of a single visible failure, but because the layer of the organization responsible for translating strategy into daily execution has quietly lost the capacity to do it well.
There is also a forward-looking dimension to this that deserves particular attention. Gallup's newest research found that managers are critical to successful AI adoption inside organizations, with employees who strongly agree their manager actively supports AI use being nearly nine times more likely to report that AI has genuinely transformed how work gets done in their organization. A disengaged manager is not simply failing to inspire their team. They are becoming a structural bottleneck to the organization's ability to adapt to exactly the kind of change most leadership teams currently consider a top strategic priority.
Why the usual response misses the actual problem
When engagement declines, most organizations reach for the same familiar toolkit: perks, pulse surveys, compensation adjustments, flexibility policies. Those tools are not without value, but they are aimed primarily at the individual contributor layer, and Gallup's research consistently shows that managers and leaders exert a disproportionate influence on engagement that generic, broad-based interventions rarely address directly.
The deeper issue is that most organizations have quietly asked more of their managers over the past several years, larger teams, more responsibility for communication and change management, more exposure to organizational uncertainty, while investing comparatively little in developing the managers themselves or protecting their capacity to do the role well. Managers have been treated as a channel for delivering engagement to others rather than as a population whose own engagement requires the same deliberate attention.
What organizations serious about this actually need to do
The research points toward a specific and somewhat uncomfortable conclusion for most leadership teams: organizational flattening and reductions in management layers should never be treated as a purely structural or financial decision. When those changes happen without genuine consideration of the resulting span of control, the scope of a manager's remaining responsibilities, and the support available to help them succeed under the new structure, the organization is not simply cutting cost. It is quietly degrading the mechanism responsible for 70 percent of its team-level engagement.
Gallup's research also found that manager talent and training can meaningfully offset the negative effect of a larger span of control, which means the decline is not an inevitable structural consequence of leaner organizations. It is a consequence of leaner organizations that have not simultaneously invested in equipping their managers to succeed under the new demands being placed on them. Organizations serious about reversing this trend are treating manager development, manager workload, and manager wellbeing as a direct lever on organizational performance rather than as a secondary concern behind broader strategic priorities.
The managers who used to carry an engagement premium into every team they led are, for many organizations, no longer carrying it. Rebuilding that premium is not primarily a morale initiative. It is one of the more direct and measurable performance investments available to any organization paying close enough attention to make it.
If your organization is ready to address the manager engagement crisis before it fully cascades through your teams, Juan Bendana builds keynotes around the psychology of confident leadership, sustained performance, and what it actually takes to equip managers to lead well under the pressure the modern organization now places on them. His talks are built for leadership conferences, corporate events, and sales kick-offs where organizations are ready to invest in the layer of leadership that determines everything else.
A team cannot be more engaged than the person leading it. Right now, in most organizations, that ceiling is lower than it has ever been.