How Managers Impact Team Productivity

Managers have an outsized influence on team productivity because they shape many of the day-to-day conditions linked to engagement and performance. Gallup's research identifies managers as the greatest influence on team engagement.

This page explores what the data show about how managers shape productivity, why manager engagement itself is in crisis and what organizations can do about it.

Why Do Managers Have Such an Outsized Effect on Team Productivity?

KEY INSIGHT: Gallup's research finds that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Because engagement is linked to productivity and other business outcomes, manager quality has significant implications for team performance.

Managers shape the day-to-day conditions that influence workplace engagement levels. Because engagement is linked to workplace productivity, employee retention, profitability, quality and organizational performance, the conditions managers create can have implications for a range of business outcomes.

Managers Set the Conditions for Performance

Gallup's research identifies the workplace conditions linked to engagement and performance. Many sit directly within a manager's span of control: whether employees know what is expected of them, whether they have opportunities to do what they do best, whether they receive recognition and whether someone at work encourages their development.

When managers meet these employee needs, they create a high-engagement workplace environment. Gallup's 2024 Q^12® meta-analysis finds that highly engaged teams outperform less engaged teams on productivity and other performance outcomes.

The Manager Engagement Crisis

KEY INSIGHT: Manager engagement has fallen nine percentage points since 2022 — the steepest decline of any worker category — and sits at 22% globally as of 2025.

According to Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, the largest single-year drop occurred between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement fell five points. Individual contributor engagement, by comparison, has held relatively steady.

Lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement.

The End of the Manager Engagement Premium

Managers historically have reported higher engagement than the employees they lead, which Gallup describes as an "engagement premium." That premium has essentially vanished.

Managers are now only about as engaged as the individual contributors on their teams, meaning organizations can no longer assume that the people responsible for driving team engagement are themselves invested in their work.

In best-practice organizations in 2025, 79% of managers were engaged — nearly four times the global average — demonstrating that the crisis is not inevitable.

What High-Impact Managers Do Differently

In studying thousands of managers over the past five decades, Gallup has identified five traits that lead to higher engagement and performance among the teams they manage:

Motivation: Inspiring teams to get exceptional work done.
Workstyle: Setting goals and arranging resources for the team to excel.
Initiation: Influencing others to act; pushing through adversity and resistance.
Collaboration: Building committed teams with deep bonds.
Thought process: Taking an analytical approach to strategy and problem-solving.

These traits describe innate tendencies associated with managerial success. Managers can also develop those tendencies through experience and ongoing development.

Motivation: How Managers Inspire Exceptional Work

Managers can strengthen motivation by helping employees understand why their work matters and how their contributions connect to the organization’s mission or purpose.

In 2024, Gallup reported that strengthening this connection to mission or purpose can lead to a 32% reduction in turnover and a 15% improvement in productivity.

Gallup’s research recommends that managers strengthen that connection by:

clarifying and modeling the organization’s mission and values
showing employees how their work contributes to something larger

Workstyle: How Managers Set Goals and Organize Resources

Successful managers are able to set clear goals, establish priorities and arrange resources so employees understand what they are expected to accomplish and have what they need to do it.

In 2019, Gallup reported that employees whose managers include them in setting performance goals are 2.3 times more likely to say those goals are realistic. When employees are included in goal setting, 76% strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work, compared with 47% when they are not included.

Gallup recommends that managers set expectations collaboratively, define what success looks like, prioritize competing work and revisit expectations as priorities change.

Initiation: How Managers Influence Action and Overcome Resistance

Initiation comes into play when managers encounter resistance. Resistance may come from people, processes or other obstacles. Effective managers are able to influence others to act and overcome such barriers.

Gallup’s 2019 It’s the Manager book revealed that initiation has remained a characteristic of successful managers across decades, but the way effective managers use it has changed. Earlier managers exerted greater control over employees and acted as the central architect of how work got done. Today’s successful managers are more likely to function as facilitators or coaches, coordinating the work rather than directing every part of it. They remain open to employee input while setting clear systems of accountability, particularly as work time and location become more flexible.

Collaboration: How Managers Build Committed Teams

Strong collaboration grows when managers create conditions for employees to trust one another, understand how their work fits together and develop strong working relationships. Gallup’s research on teamwork finds that managers play an important role in creating these conditions and that many of the same elements that support engagement also support teamwork and collaboration.

Depending on the team and its needs, managers can strengthen collaboration in several ways, including:

creating opportunities for employees to work together in ways that use what each person does best
establishing shared expectations for quality and discussing what quality looks like
setting team goals that connect employees’ work to the organization’s mission or purpose
discussing problems openly and identifying better ways for the team to work together going forward

Thought Process: How Managers Use Analysis to Guide Decisions

Gallup’s 2019 It’s the Manager found that successful managers distinguish themselves by being analytical, future-focused, systems-oriented and grounded in evidence. As managers have gained access to more information and employees have gained greater independence, strong decision-making requires managers to evaluate data and possibilities rather than rely primarily on immediate context or intuition.

Why Does Manager Talent Matter for Team Productivity?

KEY INSIGHT: Manager talent predicts productivity and other performance outcomes.

Gallup's 2020 Meta-Analytic Study of Managerial Hiring and Development Profiles, which included 136 studies with 14,597 managers, reinforced findings from prior meta-analyses: that managerial talent predicts performance across multiple outcomes, including productivity, financial performance, employee engagement, customer ratings and retention.

According to this research, about half of great people management is rooted in hardwired tendencies, while the other half comes from experiences and ongoing development.

Manager Talent Is Rare, and Most Organizations Are Getting Selection Wrong

Organizations often select managers using criteria that do not measure managerial talent. Gallup estimates that organizations choose the wrong person for a manager role 82% of the time.

When Gallup asked thousands of managers how they became managers, the two most common reasons were success in a previous nonmanagement role and tenure. Yet neither of those factors measures the natural tendencies associated with successful people management.

The Business Case for Talent-Based Selection

Gallup’s 2020 manager talent meta-analysis reaffirmed that scientifically selecting for managerial talent can substantially improve the odds of hiring a successful manager. Assuming a 50% baseline success rate, selecting from the top 10% of manager candidates would increase the expected success rate to 76%. Selecting from the top 30% would increase it to 67%.

The financial implications are also substantial. Gallup’s utility analysis estimated that selecting from the top 10% of manager candidates would relate to 32% higher revenue or sales per manager and 48% higher profit per manager.

The Talent May Already Be in Your Organization

Many organizations already have people with the potential to become effective managers. The challenge is identifying them before a management position opens.

Organizations can improve how they identify future managers by:

Assessing managerial talent. Use scientifically designed and validated instruments to evaluate the tendencies associated with successful management.
Giving employees opportunities to lead. Let promising individual contributors lead projects or teams so organizations can observe how they influence others, coordinate work and respond to challenges.
Looking beyond the usual promotion signals. Tenure and strong individual performance can be valuable, but neither should determine who becomes a manager.
Creating advancement paths outside management. High-performing individual contributors should be able to gain status and compensation without becoming managers.

How Managers Shape Productivity in an AI-Enabled Workplace

As AI becomes more integrated into everyday work, managers play an important role in how employees adopt and experience the technology. In 2026, Gallup found that AI integration with existing systems and manager-led AI adoption were the top two drivers of frequent AI use within U.S. organizations that had adopted AI.

The same analysis found that employees who strongly agree that their manager supports their team’s AI use are 7.4 times as likely to strongly agree that AI gives them more opportunities to do what they do best and 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done in their organization.

Yet in 2025, only 28% of employees in organizations implementing AI strongly agreed that their manager actively supported their team’s use of the technology.

Managers can help teams see greater value from AI by connecting the technology to employees’ daily work and helping them identify applications that fit existing workflows and solve real problems.

What Effective Manager Support Looks Like in the AI Workplace

Gallup identifies four best practices associated with higher AI adoption and stronger employee evaluations of its benefits:

Communicate a clear strategy for AI integration: Show employees how AI applies to their work and where it can solve real problems.
Champion AI use at the team level: Demonstrate how AI can be used in practice and actively encourage employees to use it.
Provide role-specific training that maximizes value and mitigates risk: Organizations should design training based on employees’ actual tasks and include guidance for secure use.
Establish clear policies and guidelines for responsible use: Well-defined policies and guidelines give employees the confidence to explore AI’s potential while staying within organizational, legal and ethical boundaries.

What HR and C-Suite Leaders Can Do Right Now

Gallup finds that HR and C-suite leaders can take four actions to improve manager performance and team productivity:

Select managers based on talent.
Develop managers into coaches.
Hold managers accountable for team engagement scores.
Ensure managers are themselves engaged.

Each is explored below.

Select Managers Based on Talent

Organizations can improve manager selection by evaluating candidates for the talents required to manage people, rather than relying on tenure or performance in a previous role alone.

Gallup’s 2025 study of U.S. frontline supervisors illustrates the risk of selecting managers primarily based on performance or experience: 65% said they obtained their role based on performance or years of frontline experience, while 30% said they were selected based on supervisory skills or experience. Supervisors in the latter group were more engaged (42% vs. 31%, respectively).

Gallup recommends a talent-based selection approach that uses validated assessments and structured interviews to help identify candidates with the potential to perform well in the role.

Develop Managers Into Coaches

The best managers are performance coaches who take a positive, future-focused approach to developing an employee’s talents into true strengths. However, many managers haven’t been taught how to properly coach others. In fact, most managers have received no management training at all. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that 44% of managers globally had ever received management training.

When managers are trained on how to develop others, it makes a difference in how their teams perform. Gallup’s research on manager development also found that managers who had completed a strengths-based manager development program, compared with their peers, had:

up to 22% higher engagement
up to 18% higher team engagement
21% to 28% lower employee turnover
20% to 28% higher likelihood of performance improvements

Hold Managers Accountable for Team Engagement Scores

Alongside measures of productivity and performance, organizations should make employee engagement one of the core responsibilities of managers. Organizations should measure engagement at the team level and make it part of how managers are evaluated. Managers should also use their own team engagement survey results to start group and individual conversations about what employees need to achieve exceptional performance. Gallup recommends using team-level results to identify workplace friction, guide action plans and track improvement over time.

Ensure Managers Are Themselves Engaged

Managers have many of the same workplace needs they are expected to meet for their teams. Gallup’s Q1 2026 U.S. data show that managers are less likely than individual contributors to strongly agree that they know what is expected of them or have the materials and equipment they need to do their work.

Leaders can strengthen manager engagement by:

Creating clarity and capacity. Clarify priorities and expectations, and reduce competing demands that pull managers away from leading their teams.
Giving managers authority and a voice. Provide appropriate decision-making authority and involve managers in changes that directly affect their work.
Managing managers well. Offer managers meaningful feedback, ongoing development and effective performance conversations.

Manager engagement should be treated as an ongoing leadership priority rather than an annual exercise. The world’s most engaged organizations use reliable engagement data and regular feedback to support manager engagement.

Frequently Asked Questions About Managers and Productivity

Why does manager engagement matter for team performance?

Manager engagement matters because a manager’s own engagement is one factor associated with team engagement. Gallup research has found that employees supervised by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged than employees supervised by actively disengaged managers. Because team engagement is linked to productivity and other business outcomes, manager engagement has implications for team performance.

How should organizations evaluate manager effectiveness?

Organizations should include team engagement as part of a manager’s evaluation. Gallup also recommends evaluating managers on their ability to develop employee talent, help employees build new skills and prepare employees for greater responsibility.

How does team size affect productivity?

There is no single ideal span of control for every manager. Gallup’s 2026 analysis found that manager engagement tends to decline as team size increases, but that pattern varies based on managerial talent. When structuring teams for strong performance, leaders should consider manager talent and capacity alongside the number of direct reports.

How often should managers check in to support team performance?

Managers should have meaningful conversations with employees every week. Gallup’s 2023 research found that employees who received meaningful feedback in the previous week were substantially more likely to be engaged. These conversations should focus on recognition, collaboration, goals and priorities, and employees’ strengths.

Improve Team Productivity Through Better Management

Managers shape the factors that influence team productivity. Gallup partners with organizations to select managers for talent and develop them to lead highly engaged, high-performing teams.