Value That Does Not Have to Be Earned

Dignity and Agency

In my job I get to meet a lot of very interesting people all over the world, and I am constantly amazed at how alike we all are and how different we all are. Yep, that was one sentence carrying two opposite ideas, but hopefully a coherent one. I have met people like one of my brothers, who is incredibly creative, friendly and a little chaotic. And I have met people like another of my brothers (I have eight siblings, so this could go on for a while) who is considered and compassionate. Same family, same dinner table, wildly different approaches to life. What I know is that the people in each of their circles would not have them any other way, because of what they bring to their friends and their families.

I am not going to work through the whole family, nor claim I have any of them fully figured out. My point is that both of these men carry a unique value, and the places they work are far better places when that value and personality is allowed to shine.

Allowing people's inherent value to be expressed at work is, I believe, one of the key foundations of human led performance. It is also catching the attention of researchers and astute leaders alike, and it usually comes down to two words. Dignity is about valuing people for who they are, a worth they carry into the building with them that does not rise and fall with the last result. Agency is about allowing people to use their gifts, talents and judgement to do their work, with real choices inside clear purpose and boundaries.

The order of things matters here. Dignity is a moral claim before it is a performance claim. People do not have to earn the right to be treated as fully human, and I would hold that position even if it never moved a single number. What I have found genuinely interesting, though, as I have dug into the research over the past few months, is that it also turns out to be a testable proposition. And the evidence keeps pointing the same way.

When leaders lead in a way that meets the autonomy needs of their people, the people respond. Graham Slemp and his colleagues pulled together 72 studies covering more than 32,000 people and found that autonomy supportive leadership was strongly linked with self-driven motivation, greater wellbeing and more constructive behaviour at work. Allan Lee, Sara Willis and Amy Wei Tian examined empowering leadership across 105 studies and found it was associated with stronger performance, more creativity and more of that discretionary effort every leader wishes they could bottle. The research on dignity itself is younger, but it is arriving. One study that followed employee and supervisor pairs over time found workplace dignity was positively associated with performance as rated by the supervisor, not just as reported by the person themselves. None of this says that dignity causes performance all on its own, and I do not want to pretend otherwise. What it says is that dignity and agency shape the conditions through which people become able, and willing, to give their best.

My favourite piece of evidence is not glamorous at all. It is a scheduling experiment. Gap, the clothing retailer, ran a randomised trial across 28 stores where managers gave two weeks' notice of rosters, stopped on-call shifts and kept start and finish times consistent. In other words, they got organised so that their people could plan a life. Sales in those stores rose by 7 per cent and labour productivity by 5 per cent. It was a package of changes, so no single element can take the credit, but I love what it says underneath. We know you have a life outside of work, and we will respect it. The expectation to work hard and work well never went anywhere. What changed was that the people doing the work were treated as though who they are matters.

Here is where it gets uncomfortable, at least for me. I firmly believe that most leaders, or at least all of the ones I get to work with, truly do value the people who work with them and for them. But that belief is not always realised when the pressure arrives. The research has a name for what happens, and it is a good one: threat rigidity. Under threat, attention narrows, information gets restricted, and decisions get pulled upwards into fewer and fewer hands. Barry Staw and his colleagues described the pattern more than forty years ago, and a major review published in 2025 confirms it still holds. And every time a leader tightens their grip in this way, they communicate something they never intended to say. I do not quite believe in you right now.

Which raises the real question. When the results dip and the timeline shortens, how does a leader stay clear about what success requires, honest about what is at stake, and still lead in a way that says your worth and your judgement are not up for review?

One more observation, and it took me a long time to see this one in myself. The leaders who find it hardest to afford dignity and agency to others are often the ones least settled about their own. If I am not comfortable with my own worth, I will compare, compete and protect my position, and my people will feel it long before I ever name it. If I am settled that I carry dignity and agency, I find I can afford it to others without keeping score.

One last thing. Dignity and agency have to travel together. Dignity without agency slides into a well-meaning paternalism, where people are cared for but never trusted with a decision that matters. Agency without dignity becomes abandonment, where 'you own it' turns out to mean 'you are on your own.' Neither builds anything that lasts. The combination does, because worth that is never in question, paired with real room to contribute inside honest accountability, is the environment adults do their best work in.

If you want to know where your own leadership actually sits, I have built a short audit that lives on my website (below). Eight statements, scored twice, once for a calm week and once for the last time you were under real pressure. It takes ten minutes and it shows you what your behaviour promotes, rather than what your intent hopes for. Fair warning: the second column can sting.

Sure, you can get performance without any of this. Carrots, sticks and close supervision have been moving numbers for a century. But that kind of performance costs the leader more energy every year to sustain, and it tends to stop the moment you stop pushing. Performance built on dignity and agency compounds, because people bring their full selves and their full talent without anyone having to extract it.

So let me leave you with the question. What survives pressure in your leadership: the belief you hold about people on a calm Tuesday, or only the version of you that arrives when the deadline slips? I don't think the answer is obvious, and I include myself in that. It is worth finding out, and the audit on the website is where I would start.

Dignity and Agency Audit

References

Slemp, G. R., Kern, M. L., Patrick, K. J., and Ryan, R. M. (2018). Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review. Motivation and Emotion, 42, 706 to 724. Across 72 studies and 32,870 people, autonomy supportive leadership was strongly and positively related to autonomous motivation, and positively related to need satisfaction, wellbeing and positive work behaviour. Implication: how you lead is itself a motivational resource, and supporting people's capacity to choose is consistently associated with healthier, more self-directed performance.

Lee, A., Willis, S., and Tian, A. W. (2018). Empowering leadership: A meta-analytic examination of incremental contribution, mediation, and moderation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 306 to 325. Across 105 samples, empowering leadership was positively associated with task performance, organisational citizenship and creativity, with trust and psychological empowerment as key mediators. Implication: delegating authority, sharing information and inviting input changes what people contribute, and the effect is strongest on creativity and discretionary effort.

Ahmed, U., et al. (2022). Stronger together: Examining the interaction effects of workplace dignity and workplace inclusion on employees' job performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 891189. In a time-lagged study of 169 employee and supervisor pairs, workplace dignity was positively associated with supervisor rated job performance, and the link strengthened where inclusion was higher. Implication: direct evidence on dignity is emerging and promising, though the field is younger than the autonomy and safety literatures.

Williams, J. C., Lambert, S. J., Kesavan, S., et al. (2018). Stable Scheduling Increases Productivity and Sales: The Stable Scheduling Study. In a randomised field experiment across 28 Gap stores, a stable scheduling package increased median sales by 7 per cent and labour productivity by 5 per cent. Implication: treating people's time as something other than a cost to be shuffled is both a dignity practice and commercially sound, with the caveat that no single element of the package can be isolated.

Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., and Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat-rigidity effects in organizational behavior: A multilevel analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 26(4), 501 to 524; and Mazzei, M. J., et al. (2025). Old habits die hard: A review and assessment of the threat-rigidity literature. Journal of Management, 51(6), 2154 to 2181. Under perceived threat, attention can narrow, information can restrict and control can centralise. Implication: the pull toward control under pressure is predictable rather than personal, which means it can be noticed, named and planned for.