WHAT IF DEMOTIVATION IS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM?
When motivation disappears, organisations often look first at the individual.
Is the employee disengaged?
Resistant to change?
Unable to adapt?
Not resilient enough?
But what if the individual is expressing something that belongs to the system?
According to Gallup, only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025.
Manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while low engagement was estimated to cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity.
These numbers are too large to be explained as a collective failure of personal motivation.
They suggest an architectural problem.
Research based on Self-Determination Theory shows that sustainable motivation depends on the fulfilment of three fundamental psychological needs:
• autonomy — having some influence over how work is performed
• competence — feeling capable, useful and able to grow
• relatedness — experiencing recognition, belonging and meaningful connection
Yet AI has entered many organisations without a corresponding redesign of this human architecture.
Tasks have been automated, but roles have not always been reimagined.
Speed has increased, but decision-making has not necessarily become clearer.
Productivity expectations have expanded, while boundaries, responsibilities and sources of professional identity have remained uncertain.
This can produce a modern version of the toil of Sisyphus.
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to push an enormous boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down each time he approached the summit.
His punishment was not simply physical effort.
It was effort deprived of completion, progress and meaning.
Something similar can happen in contemporary organisations.
People answer messages, attend meetings, update systems, correct AI-generated outputs and respond to continuously accelerating demands, only to begin again the following day, without experiencing a clear sense of advancement or authorship.
Microsoft’s workplace data describe an “infinite workday” in which employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes during core working hours, up to 275 interruptions a day.
AI may help absorb some of this burden.
But if it is simply added to fragmented processes, overlapping responsibilities and permanently expanding expectations,
it risks accelerating the boulder rather than removing it.
The problem is not AI itself.
The problem emerges when technological transformation moves faster than organisational transformation.
There is also a deeper, less visible consequence.
Work is not merely a collection of tasks. It contributes to identity.
Over time, people come to recognise themselves through what they know, what they can do, the judgement others seek from them and the value they create for a wider system.
When AI absorbs significant parts of a role without that role being reconstructed, it can produce an identity vacuum.
The individual may no longer understand:
What am I competent for now?
Where does my contribution begin?
Which part of the result is still mine?
What should I learn next?
Why does my work still matter?
This is not necessarily resistance to technology.
It may be the psychological and systemic consequence of seeing one’s professional identity progressively emptied of its familiar substance.
A forty-year meta-analysis involving 183 studies and more than 212,000 participants found that intrinsic motivation is particularly important for the quality of performance, while external incentives are more effective in predicting its quantity.
This distinction matters.
An organisation can increase output while quietly eroding the conditions that make excellent work possible.
It can appear more efficient while its people experience less autonomy, less recognition, less connection and less ownership of what they produce.
This is why organisations may need a new paradigm.
The question can no longer be limited to:
How can we use AI to make existing work faster?
It must become:
How should work, roles, relationships and decision-making be redesigned now that AI has changed what human contribution means?
This shift also invites us to think in terms of an ecology of happiness.
Happiness at work cannot be produced through isolated wellbeing initiatives imposed on an unhealthy system. Like every ecology, it emerges from the quality of the relationships among its elements:
people, purpose, power, technology, time, recognition and belonging.
If one part changes radically, as AI is changing tasks and knowledge work, the entire ecosystem must find a new balance.
What is labelled as individual demotivation may therefore be the visible symptom of a deeper systemic discomfort:
a workplace whose technology has evolved, while its roles, relationships, power structures and assumptions about human value have not.
The leadership question is no longer simply:
How do we motivate people to adapt to AI?
It is:
How must we redesign the organisational system so that people can continue to experience agency, competence, belonging, identity and meaning within an AI-enabled world?
This is where Executive and Systemic Coaching can play a critical role:
not by “fixing” the apparently demotivated individual, but by helping leaders observe the invisible architecture surrounding that person.
Because sometimes the individual is not failing to adapt to the system.
Sometimes the individual is revealing that the system itself has not yet adapted.
Sources
#ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #Motivation #OrganizationalDesign #SystemicCoaching #ExecutiveCoaching #Leadership #ProfessionalIdentity #EmployeeEngagement #HumanCenteredAI #InvisibleArchitectureOfChoices
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