Sharon Olivier ∙ Professor of Practice in Leadership at Hult International Business School
Faculty Column ∙ October 9, 2025
Engagement is a spectrum – and leaders are pivotal in determining where a team falls on it
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In today’s workplace – characterized by hybrid work, data-driven decision-making, and generational shifts – questions around team engagement remain as pressing as ever. Despite widespread efforts to measure and manage engagement through surveys and dashboards, many teams still struggle to cultivate meaningful connection and shared purpose.
The foundational Shades of Grey study conducted in 2018 offers a compelling framework to address this. Rather than treating engagement as a binary concept, the study revealed it as a spectrum shaped by emotional climate and behavioral dynamics. Based on research with 195 participants across 28 teams, it identified four zones of engagement: Engagement, Pseudo-Engagement, Contentment, and Disengagement.
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But the findings went further than mapping zones. The study showed that the role of the leader is pivotal in determining where on the spectrum a team operates. Leaders who role-model fairness, challenge constructively, and foster psychological safety were far more likely to sustain engagement. By contrast, leaders who avoided conflict, prioritized visibility over authenticity, or created climates of fear tended to drive teams into pseudo-engagement or disengagement.
Seven years and one global pandemic later, these insights remain as relevant as ever – if not even more so. The context has changed, and with it, the demands on leaders. Engagement today is influenced by four interconnected forces:
Data and metrics: The dominance of data and metrics in shaping how teams are judged risks negatively impacting culture.
The broadening role of leadership: Responsibility now extends beyond team climate to the wider stakeholder and digital ecosystem.
Multi-generational workforces: The motivational drivers of a new generation, particularly Gen Z, require fresh approaches.
Hybrid working: Engagement must now be cultivated with fewer opportunities for face-to-face connection and collaboration.
What follows explores these four dimensions – and what they mean for cultivating real engagement in today’s workplace.
1. Look beyond the metrics
In today’s workplace, the risk of “pseudo-engagement” is influenced less by AI itself and more by the explosion of data and metrics used to monitor performance. Dashboards and productivity trackers can make activity look like engagement, but they rarely capture purpose, belonging, or trust. When used superficially, data risks creating a “numbers game” culture where visibility matters more than connection.
Yet data can also be a force for good. Interpreted thoughtfully, it can help teams identify blind spots, monitor inclusion, and spark honest conversations about culture. The key is balance: using data as a starting point for dialogue, not as the final verdict on engagement.
The Shades of Grey framework reminds us that authentic engagement is grounded in trust, shared goals, and emotional safety – qualities that numbers alone cannot measure but that leaders must intentionally cultivate.
2. Leaders today must act as ecosystem stewards
The original research emphasized the central role of leaders in shaping engagement. In highly engaged teams, leaders challenged and empowered their people, role-modeled fairness, and fostered psychological safety and accountability.
These insights remain foundational – but by 2025, the leadership mandate has expanded. Engagement is now shaped within a wider ecosystem: relationships with clients, partners, regulators, communities, and increasingly the digital environment of data and AI.
Leaders today are expected to act as ecosystem stewards. Their role is not only to nurture trust and accountability within their team, but also to integrate human and technological systems in ways that support collaboration, fairness, and resilience across stakeholder networks.
In short: where leaders once anchored engagement inside the team, they are now called to steward engagement across the whole ecosystem in which their teams operate.
3. Harnessing generational diversity to unlock engagement
The study’s exploration of the “Zone of Contentment” – teams with a positive but unambitious climate – offers timely insights for today’s multigenerational workplace. These teams, often comprised of long-serving members, provide stability but can resist change, limiting innovation and demotivating younger colleagues.
This is especially relevant as Gen Z becomes a growing force in the workforce. They are purpose-driven and values-led, motivated by whether their work makes an impact, whether their voice is heard, and whether they belong to a fair and inclusive environment.
They thrive when trusted with autonomy, offered meaningful stretch, and given opportunities for continuous learning. By contrast, the “contentment” climate – focused on routine and “doing the job and going home” – is a poor cultural fit.
For leaders, this means balancing the stability of experience with the energy of purpose and innovation. Gen Z’s hunger for values-alignment can reinvigorate engagement across the whole team – but only if leaders create the conditions for different generations to learn from one another rather than pull apart.
4. Protect engagement – and inclusion – without proximity
Hybrid work has reshaped how engagement is experienced and judged. With fewer opportunities for spontaneous, face-to-face sharing, leaders can mistake online visibility for genuine commitment. The risk of pseudo-engagement is high: teams appear engaged in virtual meetings but lack deeper dialogue and shared energy. Likewise, hybrid routines can foster contentment – a comfortable climate that limits ambition and stretch.
The Shades of Grey quadrants provide a useful diagnostic. In hybrid contexts, leaders must ask: Are we seeing true engagement, or just a polished façade? Are people satisfied but stagnant? Or is disengagement being masked by hybrid invisibility?
To sustain engagement, leaders must design intentional rituals that go beyond transactional check-ins – spaces for reflection, creativity, and candid dialogue. They must also ensure inclusion so that remote colleagues have equal voice and impact. In short, hybrid working makes engagement more complex, but it also challenges leaders to reimagine connection, fairness, and collaboration across both digital and physical spaces.
Practical Takeaways
1. Look beyond metrics
Use data as a tool for dialogue, not judgment. Blend dashboards with open conversations to distinguish genuine engagement from “pseudo-engagement.”
2. Enable ecosystem stewardship
Equip leaders to connect across boundaries – aligning human relationships, stakeholder networks, and digital systems in ways that reinforce trust and resilience.
3. Foster generational engagement
Balance stability with stretch. Create cross-generational mentoring, rotate responsibilities, and design projects that align Gen Z’s values with team purpose.
4. Reimagine hybrid connection
Go beyond task updates and instead build intentional hybrid rituals that create space for creativity, collaboration, reflection, and honest dialogue. Ensure remote team members have equal opportunities to contribute, challenge, and innovate.
Meet the expert
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Sharon Olivier
Professor of Practice in Leadership at Hult International Business School
As an organizational psychologist and with significant industry experience, Sharon researches, writes and facilitates experiential learning in topics around new leadership logics for the 21st century; leadership agility; polarity management; integrative thinking; engagement and motivation; cognitive diversity and psychological safety; and emotional resiliency.
She has established a record of accomplishment as accredited individual and team coach, inspirational speaker, and author of publications including Agile Leadership for Turbulent Times; The Role of the Ego in Servant Leadership; and Mindful Leadership.
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