The Gap Between Potential and Performance

The pace of change at work has been relentless, and people feel it. Burnout, stress, and disengagement are now familiar parts of how employees describe their experience. Those realities matter. But they do not tell the whole story.

New research from Wiley Workplace Intelligence points to something equally important: a workforce that remains motivated, connected, and purposeful. Nine in ten employees say they are motivated to do their best work. Nearly all understand how their role contributes to organizational success. Most feel connected to the people around them.

The foundation is stronger than the narrative suggests. The challenge organizations face is not a lack of motivation. It is a failure to fully enable it. And leaders have the power, and the responsibility, to bridge that gap.

The Motivation-Capacity Gap Is a Leadership Accountability

Our research found that 91% of employees feel motivated to do their best work, yet only 64% say they have enough time to do it well. That difference speaks to a significant gap in the desire to produce quality work and the actual resources to make sure that it happens.

Only 64% report having enough time to do work well.

What organizations face right now is not an engagement crisis. It is a capacity-and-clarity crisis, and addressing it falls within leadership’s scope.

Enabling people to do their best work is not a passive responsibility. It requires leaders to actively remove barriers, build structures that support performance, and ensure that the conditions for success exist alongside the expectation to succeed.

Direction Is Clearest at the Top

When asked about the relationship between levels of hope and their understanding of organizational direction, we uncovered a surprising discrepancy when it comes to communication about organizational direction itself.

We found that 82% of executives say senior leaders communicate direction clearly. Among managers, that number falls to 58%.

58% of managers report leaders communicate direction clearly.

That twenty-four-point gap is not a communication problem in the conventional sense. It is evidence of what happens when vision is articulated at the top but not actively reinforced throughout. Direction does not travel automatically. It requires translation at every level, from senior leaders to directors to managers to supervisors, each of whom must make the organization’s larger direction legible in the context of the work immediately in front of their teams.

The cost is measurable. Employees who feel confident about organizational direction report markedly higher hope and optimism. Clarity creates hope. The question is whether leaders are actively extending it or simply assuming it trickles down.

Joy Is Local. Leadership Has to Meet It There.

When employees were asked who influenced their sense of joy at work, 39% named their team. 19% said they shape their own joy. Only 6% credited senior leadership.

This is not criticism of organizational leaders; it is a clarification of how leadership functions in the day-to-day experience of work. The behaviors that most reliably strengthen hope and joy are not announced from the top. They are modeled in daily interactions: in how managers acknowledge effort, in whether teams feel safe to raise concerns, in whether recognition is timely and specific.

17% have not felt joy at work in over three months.

Nearly half of employees reported experiencing joy at work within the past week. 17% have not felt it in three months or more. That divergence reflects differences in the immediate leadership environment and if they are practicing the behaviors that make work feel worthwhile.

The Manager in the Middle Carries More Than Organizations Recognize

Managers continue to carry an outsized amount of stress. We found that 46% of people managers report severe stress, compared to 27% of employees without direct reports. Managers are almost twice as likely to be operating under significant strain, with less time and fewer resources.

The effects extend outward. Managers under high stress are 19% less likely to believe their organization develops people effectively. Supervisors are nearly eight times more likely than executives to report uncertainty about whether they have experienced joy at work recently.

Leading with presence and consistency requires capacity. When managers are stretched past the point of intentional leadership, they do not stop caring about their teams. They lose the bandwidth to lead in ways that actually reach people. Supporting managers is not a well-being initiative. It is a leadership effectiveness strategy.

What Leaders Can Do

The research does not describe a workforce that has given up. It describes one that is motivated and purposeful but held back by conditions that organizational leadership has the power to change.

Reinforce direction at every level, not just at the top. The twenty-four-point clarity gap between executives and supervisors is not inevitable. It is the result of assuming communication on direction flows rather than requiring active reinforcement. Leaders must translate organizational priorities continuously, making the larger direction legible in the context of the work each person is doing.

Protect the conditions that enable people to succeed. Motivation is strong. Time and resources are not keeping pace. Organizations that ask harder questions about workload, support structures, and resource allocation are doing the foundational work that allows commitment to hold.

Invest in manager capacity as a strategic priority. Managers are the primary translators of organizational culture. When they are stretched, clarity erodes and recognition suffers. Organizations that give managers time, tools, and clear direction create the conditions in which good leadership can actually be practiced, not just expected.

Build team-level practices that sustain belonging. Joy lives closest to coworkers. When connection drops alongside joy, as 50% of employees report it does, the path back runs through the team.

Recognition, psychological safety, and visible collaboration are the practices that create the culture, not byproducts of it. The foundation is strong. The conditions need work. That is precisely the kind of challenge that exemplary leadership exists to meet.

Wiley’s suite of professional solutions provides a structure and common language to help empower entire organizations with the skills needed to get to the next level. From building better teams with The Five Behaviors®, and improving understanding to create engaged, collaborative, and adaptive cultures with Everything DiSC® on Catalyst™, helping you make confident hiring decisions with PXT Select®, or unlocking your leaders’ potential to drive team and organizational performance with 360 feedback from The Leadership Challenge®, Wiley has innovative solutions that help make the workplace a better place.

Wiley Workplace Intelligence conducts in-depth research on key workplace issues by gathering insights from individual contributors, managers, and leaders. Wiley Workplace Intelligence then analyzes these findings to provide actionable solutions that are shared in our blog.