Four tensions are straining today’s workplace. Executives want faster AI adoption while employees are questioning the future it creates. Managers are expected to shoulder more work while being targeted for reduction. Organizations are asking for substantial energy for change from people who feel spent. Work-location and return-to-office (RTO) decisions are contests over whose needs count most.

These themes dominated headlines and executive agendas throughout 2026. They appear to be complex, separate issues. But are they?

Organizational drift is the natural tendency of people within a human system to grow apart over time. This growing distance concerns how well we understand one another, believe in our shared direction, trust the exchange, identify with the group, contribute, and coordinate. People can sit beside each other and still be miles apart in the ways that matter to the work.

Growth can increase the demands of maintaining connection. As a company expands, new people bring new relationships and working preferences. Specialization creates different languages and priorities. Additional layers put more steps between a decision and the people carrying it out. As the organization changes, leaders need to revisit how people share priorities, make decisions, and coordinate work. A larger headcount, more customers, more resources, and more technologies won’t do that work for us on their own.

One executive made the challenge tangible through a simple comparison: ten people create 45 possible pairings; 100 create 4,950. The argument isn’t that every employee needs to speak to everyone else. It’s that informal arrangements that serve a small group can become overwhelmed as the organization grows. Another executive recalled the moment he realized he no longer knew everyone’s name or family. Growth had changed the conditions of tight connection.^13,14

The Center’s study of organizational drift stands on substantial foundations:

• Lawrence and Lorsch studied differentiation and integration.
• Greiner examined the challenges of growth.
• Dekker and Snook showed how everyday adaptations can accumulate into wider vulnerability.
• Coase examined the costs of organizing work.

Organizational drift brings these related concerns into a common frame and names a universal vulnerability of human systems: the connections that make collective work possible require deliberate maintenance.^{15,16,17,18,19}

Dunbar’s work reminds us that human relationships have limits. For leaders, the useful lesson is to design ways for connection to survive beyond the people we can personally know. Shared purpose, clear decisions, and reliable coordination become more consequential as familiarity becomes harder to sustain. Every human system is governed by its mechanical, relational, and intentional conditions. A breakdown in any one of these can disrupt the rest. Both the work and the workers suffer as a result.²⁰

The report’s central proposition is that drift is the default: connection requires deliberate care as people, expectations, and conditions change. This is a research-informed theoretical position, not a claim that every organization is currently deteriorating. The extent of drift depends on how people sustain their relationships and renew their ways of working.

Cohesion is the organization’s capacity to accomplish work together through Hope, Mutuality, Commitment, and Synchrony. People can disagree, specialize, and bring different perspectives while remaining connected to a shared purpose. Cohesion helps organizations stick together and better metabolize the inherent tensions of change, uncertainty, and stress.

The spiral models cohesion as a series of loops. The width of each loop represents how far apart the members of a team or organization have grown in their understanding, expectations, relationships, and ways of working. Wider loops illustrate greater distance between people; narrower loops illustrate stronger connection and greater cohesion.

The workplace pressures described in Part I give us reason to investigate these connections. They do not yet provide a direct measure of how much organizational drift is increasing.

Four interrelated forces and counterforces

The four force pairs help us examine what is pulling people apart and what could bring them closer together. A single workplace issue can involve several pairs. AI adoption, for example, can raise questions about the future, fairness, belonging, and coordination. Begin with a recurring workplace problem, then use the pairs to explore what is happening between the people involved. The sections below each begin with an invented workplace example. Executive interview accounts and research findings follow, with endnote numbers identifying their sources.

This model is informed by research on trust, psychological safety, commitment, shared understanding, relational coordination, performance psychology, and operations theory. It brings those insights together with a focus on the distance between people. Leaders can use it to connect recurring workplace symptoms with gaps in relationships and coordination, then identify changes that could counteract drift.

Doubt vs. Hope

Doubt takes hold when people struggle to believe in a shared direction, their ability to influence it, or the promises being made. An uncertain future can still feel worth pursuing when people believe they can find their way together. Drift grows when that belief becomes harder to sustain. Research on broken psychological contracts links perceived broken promises with poorer work attitudes and behaviors. Leaders’ assurances carry less weight when experience has taught people to question them.²¹

Hope gives people something they can act on. Snyder’s work connects a meaningful goal, a sense of agency, and pathways toward it. People need to see where we are going, why that future is worth pursuing, and how they can help bring it about. They also need workable routes forward when the first plan fails. Research on collective efficacy emphasizes the importance of confidence in what a group can accomplish together.^22,23

In the hypothetical AI rollout above, strengthening Hope means giving employees a credible account of their place in the change: how their roles may evolve, what support they will receive, and how they can influence decisions affecting their work. Leaders may not have every answer. They can be clear about what is known, acknowledge what remains undecided, and follow through on the commitments they make. People have more reason to invest in a shared future when they can see a place for themselves in it and a way to help shape it.

Self-interest vs. Mutuality

Self-interest becomes a force of drift when fear, anxiety, and self-protection undermine shared work. It is often a rational response when people believe the organization is asking more of them than it offers in return. Describing that response as selfishness can obscure the conditions that make cooperation expensive or risky.

Mutuality makes cooperation a fair proposition. People can see what they contribute, what they receive, and how others share the responsibility. Research on trust and social exchange helps explain why a request may feel safe in one relationship yet costly in another.^24,25,26

One executive reflected on how risk looks different depending on the position. An owner with substantial upside may welcome uncertainty that feels threatening to an employee with far less to gain. Calling the opportunity shared does not make the stakes equal. Leaders need to understand the exchange as others experience it.²⁷

When cooperation feels risky or unfair, people may withhold information, limit the time and energy they offer, or negotiate every request. If helping others has repeatedly brought an employee more demands without support, recognition, or relief, protecting their time and energy can feel necessary. The AI-adoption and return-to-office examples in Part I may also involve failures in Mutuality; workers see the benefits for employers while feeling they are being asked to shoulder too much of the risk or burden.

Withdrawal vs. Commitment

Withdrawal is a pulling back of attention, judgment, energy, or identification. People may learn that speaking up changes nothing, taking initiative creates trouble, or giving more simply invites another assignment. Understanding Withdrawal requires us to ask what changed in the person’s experience of the group.

Research on engagement, loneliness, and belonging brings different aspects of people’s experience into view. For a leader, the invitation is to notice whose voice has gone quiet and learn what changed.^1,28,29,30

Commitment combines a willingness to invest ourselves in the work with a positive identification with the group: its membership becomes part of how we understand ourselves. Research distinguishes wanting to stay from feeling obliged to stay and unable to leave. Keeping someone on the payroll tells us little about their sense of belonging or the judgment and initiative they are willing to offer. Psychological safety and meaningful attachment to the organization help us understand what makes fuller participation possible.^{31,32,33,34,35,36}

Leadership decisions can affect people’s willingness to contribute. One chief executive recalled overriding a senior leader on a change that he firmly believed was right for the business. His account of what followed was blunt: “He completely shut down. He stopped taking initiative.” The operational change proceeded, but the leader’s account suggests that the employee’s initiative diminished.¹⁴

Leaders sometimes need to overrule a colleague. The question is how they do it: whether they explain the reasoning, hear the person’s concerns, and preserve room for that person to contribute to the next step.

Managers need room to maintain the relationships that allow for healthy contribution. Gallup’s feedback findings, Gallagher’s work on survey follow-through, and Adobe’s onboarding research all direct attention to what happens after we ask people for feedback or ideas. Asking for feedback and then failing to respond can weaken people’s willingness to contribute again.^10,37,38

Withdrawal weakens both contribution and affiliation. Problems are raised later, fewer alternatives are offered, and the people closest to the work exercise less judgment. People may also stop seeing the team’s success as part of their own identity. Restoring Commitment means rebuilding credible opportunities to matter and maintaining a group that people feel proud to belong to. It is important to understand that demands for unpaid overwork should not be disguised as commitment.

Discord vs. Synchrony

Discord describes a failure of fit in timing, shared understanding, priorities, ownership, or handoffs. It may involve interpersonal conflict, but it can also arise from arrangements that make coordination difficult among people who respect each other.

Synchrony is the fit between interdependent pieces of work. People need compatible priorities, clear ownership, useful information, and timing they can rely on. Research on shared mental models and coordination provides a foundation. Gittell’s research on relational coordination emphasizes shared goals, shared knowledge, mutual respect, and communication suited to the work.^39,40,41

Research on work location shows why these connections matter in daily work. Changing where people work changes who they encounter and how information moves. Every arrangement needs an answer to the same question: how will the people who depend on one another stay connected?^42,11

An interviewed chief executive described an all-hands format that had worked when the company was smaller. As their population grew, fewer people felt comfortable asking questions in the room, and his own ability to answer had changed: “I didn’t know everything anymore, and so I wasn’t always able to give the right answer.” The format remained while the conditions that had once made it effective did not.⁴³ Gaps in communication quickly become gaps in execution.

When a handoff fails, putting more pressure on each team leaves the missing connection unaddressed. Trace a task as it moves from one team to the next. Specify the information the receiving team needs, who has authority to decide, and how changes will be communicated. The point of Synchrony is work that fits and flows smoothly.

The cost of drift

Drift increases the distance between members of a team or organization, and that distance makes the work more challenging.

Searching for the record of a decision already made. Repeating work because a handoff lacked essential information. Seeking approval because decision authority was never clarified. The organization needs this energy for delivery and improvement, but it’s already been used to fix mistakes that could’ve been avoided.

Think about two meetings. One resolves a difficult tradeoff and helps the team move ahead. The other repeats last week’s discussion because nobody recorded the decision or passed it to the people who needed it. Both take time. The first advances the work; the second repairs a preventable gap in coordination. That distinction helps us recognize Corrective Effort.

The effort model makes the tradeoff visible:

For a given team and period, more effort spent on avoidable repair leaves less effort for real progress. Increasing cohesion may reverse drift, increase efficiency, and optimize the deployment of effort people have available. Leaders need to reduce avoidable repair and support the capacity to do useful work.

Several studies put the burden of organizational friction into perspective:

These estimates describe different kinds of burden and should be read separately. Their practical message is worth our attention: time spent working around organizational problems leaves less time to advance the organization’s purpose.^5,6,7,8

That repair work often falls to the same people. They know who to call, which approval is holding up a decision, and how to rescue a stalled handoff. Research on collaborative overload shows how a small share of employees can end up doing a disproportionate amount of the work that helps others collaborate. Every rescue draws on time and attention they also need for their own work. The colleague who always saves the day may be showing us both what the organization has failed to provide and whose capacity is paying for it.^44,45,46

Korn Ferry’s workload findings capture the frustration of feeling too busy to do the work that delivers results. Before asking people to be more productive, follow where their effort goes. Identify one recurring repair and change the arrangement that has made it necessary.⁴⁷

The Center is developing a way to study drift’s economic cost. Leaders can begin now by identifying work that repeatedly needs repair, testing a better arrangement, and observing what changes. Reclaiming room for meaningful work is a practical reason to act.

The Pronoun Tell

Begin with a frustration people recognize. Then ask, “Yes, but why?” Stay with a specific example long enough to understand what happened. Who made the decision? Who carried the consequences? What information or authority was missing? The answer may reveal a relationship or working arrangement that has drifted.

Listen to the pronouns. “We decided” and “they decided” place the speaker in different relationships to a decision. “Corporate” can describe a location, an authority, or a group that now feels remote. The Pronoun Tell helps us notice where people locate themselves in the organization.

Consider a hypothetical disagreement about starting work for a new client. The delivery team says, “We need time to prepare before we can deliver what we promised.” Sales replies, “We need to start on the date we agreed with the client.” Each “we” refers to a different group with a legitimate concern. Who is taking responsibility for the handoff between the teams?

Context matters. “They” may accurately describe who made the decision. A warm “we” can refer to a team that has turned against the rest of the organization. Use the language as an opening to understand the relationship.

Ask who the speaker means by “we” or “they.” Listen to how those words are used when people describe success, difficulty, or responsibility. Does “we” include the whole organization in one situation but only a department in another? A repeated pattern gives us something concrete to discuss with the people involved.

Ask about the relationship underneath the language: how was the decision made, what involvement did people have, and what would help them contribute to the decision? Asking someone to say “we” instead of “they” does not change whether they were heard or involved.

Also listen for “we” when everyone assumes someone else will handle a shared task. A sense of shared responsibility still needs a named person to take the next step. Chaser’s findings on shared tasks make unclear ownership an especially useful place to look.⁴⁸

Drift Self-Audit: a six-item conversation guide

Choose one of your teams, functions, or recurring cross-functional workflows. Consider the previous 30 days and mark each pattern Rarely, Sometimes, or Often. Invite team members and leaders to answer from their own experience; leaders should not guess how employees would respond. Ask together: what are we doing that sustains this pattern, and what can we change? Record examples and compare perspectives before drawing conclusions.

Use the following Drift Self-Audit to start a conversation. Record examples and compare perspectives. The responses are discussion prompts, not a validated scale, and should not be totaled into a score.

Use the patterns to choose where to look. Reopened decisions invite a closer look at Doubt and Hope. Protection of local interests directs attention to Mutuality. Fading initiative asks us to examine Commitment. Repaired handoffs and unclear ownership bring Synchrony into view. Follow the experience before settling on an explanation.

Choose a pattern that people can describe with a recent example. Look at it from both sides of the relationship and consider workload, capability, customer needs, and necessary controls. Agree on one change and a time to return to the conversation.

Recognition matters when it changes our practice. Start with one recurring problem, bring the people closest to it into the conversation, and agree on a change with effects you can observe. The following practices turn the model into everyday leadership work.

The four counterforces interact. Clarifying a handoff strengthens Synchrony and may also rebuild Commitment when repeated breakdowns have discouraged people from contributing. Making cooperation fairer strengthens Mutuality and may restore Hope when people have learned to doubt leaders’ promises. Begin with a specific workplace problem, then examine which connections need attention.

Strengthening Hope to counteract Doubt

When people repeatedly revisit agreed priorities, examine whether people can describe the intended outcome and the choices available to them. A destination becomes more credible when leaders explain what success would look like, the time horizon, and the conditions that cannot be traded away.

Give people the reasoning they need to act. Explain the difficult tradeoffs behind a decision, while respecting limits on what can responsibly be shared. If circumstances change, explain which assumption changed and how it affects the route forward. Presenting alternatives can support agency when a single fixed plan would invite either blind compliance or repeated escalation. These practices reflect Hope’s emphasis on goals, agency, and pathways.²²

Make the future personally meaningful. Explain how people’s roles may evolve, what support will be available, and which decisions they can help shape. Where answers remain open, name the uncertainty and agree on when to return to it. Review approval rules that limit people’s ability to act, retaining necessary safeguards while restoring useful discretion.

Make listening visible in what happens next. Explain what feedback changed, what remains unchanged, and why. Research from Qualtrics and Gallagher makes follow-through a useful place to start. Complete one promised response and show people the result.^49,37

Strengthening Mutuality to counteract Self-interest

When cooperation repeatedly requires negotiation, examine what the participants are being asked to give and what they can reasonably expect in return. Include time, risk, recognition, authority, and the effect on their own responsibilities. Compensation is one part of the exchange, not its entirety.

One chief executive described the intention behind his own organization’s lack of bureaucracy: “I really wanted to see if we could create an organization that didn’t need to legislate behavior.” His approach combines clear guidelines with conversations about exceptions, giving people room to exercise judgment.⁵⁰

Review measures and rewards alongside stated expectations. In the sales-and-product example, leaders could allocate time for the sales team’s contribution, adjust its revenue target to reflect that time, or give it credit for the shared result. Agree with both teams on what help is needed and how success will be judged. The measures and workload should make the requested cooperation feasible.

Give groups a goal that requires them to succeed together, with a fair arrangement for sharing the work. Sherif’s research on superordinate goals provides a foundation for this approach. Make the interdependence practical: name what each group needs from the other and what each will contribute.⁵¹

Recognize the work that makes another group more effective. Notice whether the same few people keep doing the work that helps other groups succeed. Research on collaborative overload gives leaders a reason to redistribute that burden and make essential connecting work visible.⁴⁵

Strengthening Commitment to counteract Withdrawal

When initiative or attachment fades, ask what has changed in the person’s experience of the group. Do they feel heard, valued, and proud to belong? What happens when they offer an idea or take initiative? Does a new assignment replace something, or simply add to a workload that is already full?

Give managers room to manage. Examine their individual assignments, direct reports, administrative demands, and authority. Training is more likely to help when managers have time to put it into practice.^10,52

Make prioritization concrete by retiring or deferring work when new commitments arrive. Give people meaningful ownership, with the information and discretion needed to exercise judgment. Use feedback to connect their contribution to the team’s progress and ask what is preventing them from contributing as they would like. Weekly meaningful feedback is associated with engagement in Gallup’s research.¹⁰

Build affiliation through real participation. Help new colleagues form relationships, understand the team’s purpose, and contribute to shared work. Invite established members to shape team practices and recognize contributions that express what the group stands for. Adobe’s onboarding research also points to the need for accessible information: keep required material manageable and explain when to use it.^33,38

When someone raises a concern, offers an idea, or disagrees, explain how you will consider their input and when they can expect a response. Explain how the contribution influenced the decision, or why another course was chosen. These responses help people judge whether their voice matters to the group. Research on psychological safety and commitment supports attention to these conditions.^35,31,32,36

Strengthening Synchrony to counteract Discord

Choose a recurring handoff that requires repair. Follow it with the people on both sides, and identify what the receiving group needs in order to proceed. The missing element may be a decision, a purpose, a risk, an owner, or an agreed definition of completion.

Name accountability at the next decision point. Many people can contribute, and some decisions properly require shared authority. The arrangement should still make clear who brings the relevant people together, who decides, who executes, and how disagreement will be resolved. A due date only helps when the necessary inputs and authority make it feasible.

Carry context with the work. Include why it matters, its current state, relevant prior decisions, known risks, and the action now required. Keep that information proportionate to the task. A handoff template that becomes another document nobody can use has recreated the problem in a different format.

As work becomes more specialized, give equal attention to how it comes back together. Research on differentiation, integration, and coordination helps leaders design how specialized teams will work together. A connecting role, a regular conversation, or clearer decision rights can help people see how their piece fits.^15,40,41

Five research questions for 2027

1. How is manager engagement changing, and under what working conditions?

   We will compare the next compatible global estimate with the 22 percent reported for 2025 and examine evidence on span of control, individual assignments, and support. We will distinguish changes in engagement from explanations that require further study.^1,10

2. How does clarity about AI affect readiness to adopt it?

   We will examine whether understanding AI’s purpose, its implications for one’s role, and available support is associated with use and readiness beyond access alone. Measures should account for task suitability, resources, and working conditions.^53,54,55

3. Where does strategic clarity differ across organizational levels?

   We will ask executives, managers, and frontline employees comparable questions about priorities, tradeoffs, and decision authority. We will examine differences in either direction rather than presume that clarity always declines farther from the executive team.

4. How do reorganizations change the work of coordination?

   We will seek cases that document ownership, handoffs, waiting, and repair effort before and after restructuring. We will distinguish leaders’ stated reasons for a change from evidence about what happened to the work.

5. How does coordination quality relate to outcomes across office, hybrid, and remote arrangements?

   We will examine handoff reliability, shared understanding, delivery, and retention while accounting for job type and other differences. Location and the quality of connection deserve to be studied together.^56,42,11,57

Does recovery become disproportionately difficult?

Does there come a point when the distance between us becomes much harder to repair? Restoring cohesion may become harder as people leave, useful knowledge is lost, and disappointments accumulate. We need to understand if recovery becomes disproportionately difficult, and what leaders can do early on to prevent this.

Answering that question requires following distance and recovery over time. The findings should help leaders decide where to intervene and what a credible path back might require. For now, it remains an open research question with practical urgency.

Building a comparable measurement program

The planned annual measurement program will track Hope, Mutuality, Commitment, and Synchrony alongside Corrective Effort. It will also examine how connected people feel across organizational levels, how clearly they understand priorities, and how they describe their relationships in interviews.

The early pilots raise a specific question for further study. Among 22 construction-company respondents and 27 higher-education HR-association respondents, Mutuality and Synchrony were the lower-scoring pair; Hope and Commitment were the higher pair. Association respondents assessed their own workplace teams. These small convenience samples provide a starting point: does the pattern recur in broader samples? What working conditions might help explain it? The full results and limitations appear in Methodology and Limitations.

Our next work will also extend measurement to Corrective Effort and strategic clarity: how well people understand priorities, tradeoffs, and decision authority. A consistent protocol will help later results support meaningful comparisons.

We will broaden participation beyond professional networks, gather feedback on whether the assessment reflects participants’ workplace experience, test its reliability and validity, and measure outcomes that can challenge as well as support the model.

An advisory board is being formed to strengthen this work. Larger samples, a normative base, and a way to estimate drift’s economic cost are priorities ahead. Leaders already have a place to begin: look for the symptoms of drift, recognize the mechanics that are increasing distance, change the conditions that perpetuate it, and learn from what happens next.