New Research Finds Managers Report Significantly Higher Stress Than Staff, Threatening Engagement

Global employee engagement has fallen to 20 percent in 2025, marking the lowest level recorded since the pandemic disruptions of 2020 and costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. While organizations have poured billions into artificial intelligence and workplace transformation, the fundamental metric of workforce participation has declined for two consecutive years. The headline figure, however, masks a deeper structural shift within the corporate hierarchy. The drop in overall engagement is not evenly distributed across the workforce; rather, it is heavily concentrated in the management layer, fundamentally altering the psychological contract of leadership.[1][4][5][7]

Between 2022 and 2025, manager engagement collapsed by nine points, dropping from 31 percent to 22 percent globally. The sharpest single-year decline occurred between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement fell by five points. During this same period, the engagement levels of individual contributors remained relatively flat, dipping slightly before rebounding to 19 percent. This convergence has effectively erased what researchers previously termed the "engagement premium"—the historical norm where the people running teams were consistently more invested in the organization than the people reporting to them.[1][3][6]

The practical stakes of this collapse are severe because managers account for 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. When the individuals responsible for activating the workforce disengage, the effect compounds downward through the entire organization. A disengaged manager creates disengaged individual contributors, spreading workplace burnout rapidly and eroding the performance of the broader enterprise. The emotional weather of the leadership layer dictates the operational reality for the front line, making manager wellbeing a critical performance variable rather than a peripheral human resources concern.[1][2][4][6]

The data reveals a striking paradox at the heart of modern leadership. When asked to evaluate their overall lives, leaders and managers report higher levels of thriving and general job engagement than their teams. They are adept at describing their work as meaningful and purposeful, constructing a narrative of professional success. Yet, when measuring their actual daily experiences, these same leaders report significantly higher rates of negative emotions than the individual contributors they manage.[1][2]

Specifically, leaders are substantially more likely to report experiencing daily stress, scoring seven percentage points higher than individual contributors. They also report experiencing anger at a rate twelve points higher, sadness eleven points higher, and loneliness ten points higher than their staff. This disconnect suggests that while the "remembering self" of a manager constructs a positive view of their career trajectory, their "experiencing self" is carrying an unsustainable emotional burden that the broader organization rarely registers.[1][2]

The pressures driving this emotional burden are largely structural. Middle managers are increasingly squeezed between new executive priorities and the daily realities of employee expectations. Flattened organizational charts and reductions in mid-level roles—often accelerated by artificial intelligence adoption—have widened spans of control. The managers who remain are overseeing larger teams with fewer resources, absorbing anxiety from their direct reports while simultaneously managing pressure from senior leadership.[4][6]

This structural squeeze is exacerbated by the translation burden placed on middle management. Managers are routinely tasked with delivering and enforcing executive decisions—such as return-to-office mandates, budget constraints, or strategic pivots—that they did not make and cannot always compensate their teams for. They feel personally responsible for retention, performance, and morale, yet highly exposed when any of those metrics slip, creating a chronic state of high-stakes translation work.[6]

Loneliness emerges as a particularly destructive force within this dynamic. As individuals move up the organizational chart, they frequently lose peer relationships and can no longer vent to their own teams. Research indicates that when leaders feel lonely, they tend to ruminate after work, which measurably reduces their engagement and effectiveness the following day. This isolation is self-perpetuating; followers quickly notice the diminished capacity, rating lonely leaders as less empowering, which further degrades the team's operational trust.[2]

A significant vulnerability underlying this crisis is a widespread lack of preparation. Globally, only 44 percent of managers have received any formal management training. The vast majority of managers are promoted because they excelled as individual contributors, a role that requires a completely different skill set than leading other humans through periods of high-stakes change. The assumption that new leaders will simply absorb management skills on the job has proven structurally inadequate for the current economic environment.[6]

The disengagement of the management layer also threatens the return on investment for major technological initiatives. Engaged managers are the primary non-technical factor determining whether artificial intelligence investments actually produce organizational value. Employees are nearly nine times more likely to view their work as positively transformed by artificial intelligence when their managers actively support its use. Without an engaged management layer to translate strategy into daily tasks, technological tools fail to reshape roles beyond basic task execution.[4][5]

Leaving this chronic stress unmanaged carries a steep organizational cost. Chronic stress narrows a leader's cognitive focus toward what feels immediately urgent rather than what is strategically important. This compromised cognitive state shifts risk judgment, increases the likelihood of reactive decision-making, and causes conflict to escalate faster than it should. Organizations that treat these outcomes merely as a personal resilience problem will burn through their leadership capacity faster than they can replace it.[2][5]

Reversing this trend requires a systemic redesign of how organizations support their leadership layer. The most effective interventions treat manager wellbeing as an organizational design issue rather than an individual failing. Best-practice organizations, where 79 percent of managers remain highly engaged, achieve these results through deliberate structural support and targeted development, proving that the decline in manager engagement is not inevitable.[1][5][6]

Targeted coaching and development programs yield immediate and measurable returns. Data shows that participants in dedicated manager coaching programs experience up to a 22 percent increase in engagement, while their respective teams see up to an 18 percent boost. Furthermore, manager performance metrics improve by 20 to 28 percent following these interventions, with the positive effects persisting for nine to eighteen months after the training concludes.[7]

Ultimately, the most powerful mechanism for restoring the engagement premium is active, ongoing support. While baseline training increases the percentage of thriving managers from 28 percent to 34 percent, providing managers with a dedicated mentor or coach who actively encourages their development causes that thriving rate to jump to 50 percent. Addressing the manager crisis through structured development may be the single most effective wellbeing initiative an organization can fund in the current economy.[7]