There is a particular kind of meeting that leaves almost everyone feeling optimistic. A new initiative has been announced, the presentation is convincing, people volunteer to contribute, and the discussion is full of enthusiasm. By the end, the team appears committed and management has every reason to report a successful launch. What may still be unclear is who can make the necessary decisions, how the work will fit around existing responsibilities and what will happen when the new priorities conflict with the old ones.
Those questions tend to become more pressing once everyone returns to their usual jobs. The people who volunteered are already responsible for other projects. A proposed change needs approval from a department that was not involved in the planning. Managers discover that they can encourage their teams to participate but cannot release them from existing obligations. The initiative is moving, in the sense that people are attending meetings and completing assigned tasks, yet some of the decisions required to make meaningful progress remain unresolved.
None of this means that the enthusiasm at the launch was false. People may genuinely believe in the initiative, welcome the proposed changes and want to contribute. The problem begins when their visible motivation is treated as evidence that the organisation is ready to deliver.
Motivation is an attractive signal for management because it is immediately observable. People speak confidently, respond positively and appear willing to take responsibility. The conditions that determine whether they can act are less visible. Decision authority, conflicting incentives, available time and dependencies between departments are considerably harder to judge from the atmosphere of a meeting. A team can therefore leave a convincing impression of readiness while still lacking some of the conditions needed to make the proposed changes work.
An insurance adviser had her eye on a house in one of the city’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. After years of excellent results, she thought her success deserved a better postcode. The company’s new incentive matrix was designed with its own long-term interests in mind. She spotted an attractive twelve-month opportunity. She worked evenings and weekends, earned record commissions and saved the deposit. Management celebrated her extraordinary motivation as proof that the new scheme worked. The following year, she returned to her usual pace.
In their 2008 study of knowledge sharing, Siemsen, Roth and Balasubramanian examined the combined effects of motivation, opportunity and ability. They found that these factors can operate as constraints: when opportunity or ability is the limiting factor, increasing motivation alone may have little effect on the behaviour in question. The research concerned knowledge sharing rather than organisational transformation as a whole, but the distinction is relevant. People may be willing to do something without having the authority, resources or practical opportunity to do it.
Consider a manager asked to support a new customer-service process. She agrees with the proposal and encourages her team to participate. The process requires changes to an IT system, revised responsibilities between departments and additional training. She can arrange meetings, collect feedback and motivate her employees, but she cannot authorise the system changes or decide which existing tasks her team may stop performing. Her commitment is genuine. So are the limitations on what she can accomplish. By the next progress meeting, she is expected to explain the delay, although the decision holding up the project still belongs to someone else.
Management might organise another meeting, ask leaders to reinforce the importance of the initiative or demand more frequent progress reports. Those actions are easier to implement than resolving a disagreement between departments or redistributing work. They may also be useful if the team has genuinely lost interest. But if the original constraints remain in place, another round of encouragement leaves the underlying problem largely untouched.
Urgency can make the situation more difficult. Organisations often use deadlines and a strong sense of urgency to mobilise people during change. Fredberg and Pregmark (2022) examined the double-edged role of urgency in organisational transformation. Urgency can help organisations act, but it can also encourage defensive behaviour and a focus on protecting immediate results. A team under pressure may become extremely busy managing deadlines, preparing reports and demonstrating progress while the more difficult decisions required for the transformation continue to wait.
Not everyone who has reservations will express them in the meeting.
Elizabeth Morrison’s (2023) review of employee voice and silence describes how employees’ decisions to raise concerns are influenced by their expectations about the consequences of speaking, the likelihood of being heard and the surrounding organisational climate. People do not always disclose problems simply because they recognise them.
At the launch of an initiative, a manager may already know that her department cannot meet the proposed timetable without abandoning other commitments. She might also know that the project sponsor has invested considerable personal credibility in the announced deadline. Raising the capacity problem in front of an enthusiastic group may feel less like contributing useful information and more like becoming the first person to challenge the project. There need not be an explicit instruction to remain positive. The setting itself can influence what people are prepared to say.
Westphal and Bednar (2005) studied a related phenomenon among corporate boards. Their research on pluralistic ignorance showed how directors could underestimate the extent to which others shared their concerns, contributing to the persistence of weak corporate strategies. Their evidence concerned boardroom decision-making, but it illustrates why apparent consensus deserves careful interpretation. Several people may privately question a decision while each assumes that everyone else is more confident.
At a project launch, one department may assume the technology team has accepted a deadline. The technology team assumes the business has already secured the necessary budget. The business sponsor believes the operational managers have confirmed that staff can be released for training. Each party leaves with a slightly different understanding of what the others have agreed to. Their enthusiasm may be sincere, but their agreement does not yet amount to a workable arrangement.
As the initiative progresses, those differences become harder to accommodate. Additional meetings are scheduled to clarify responsibilities. Temporary solutions are introduced so that individual tasks can continue. Managers spend increasing amounts of time resolving dependencies that were never properly settled. The organisation may respond with more coordination, more reporting and renewed appeals for commitment, without reconsidering whether the original arrangements were capable of supporting the promised result.
After months of public commitment, reconsidering the original approach becomes more difficult. People have endorsed the initiative, spent time and resources on it and perhaps associated their professional credibility with its success.
Sleesman and colleagues (2012), in their meta-analysis of escalation of commitment, examined the psychological, social and organisational factors associated with continued investment in a course of action despite unfavourable information. Their findings do not suggest that motivation itself causes escalation. They do help explain why a project can become harder to reconsider once significant commitments have accumulated around it.
A manager who has spent months encouraging her team to believe in a transformation may find it uncomfortable to argue that the organisation should substantially revise the approach. The difficulty increases if previous concerns were dismissed or if the project is prominently associated with senior leadership. Continuing to demonstrate commitment can become the safer response, even when the manager has serious reservations about how the work is being organised.
Some employees may express enthusiasm mainly because the situation encourages it. Others may be deeply committed to the proposed change. The same team can contain both, and individual attitudes can change as the work progresses. What management sees in a meeting is only a limited part of that picture.
A motivated employee who repeatedly encounters obstacles may eventually become frustrated. Another may continue working hard while quietly concluding that the initiative is unlikely to achieve its stated objectives. Someone else may stop raising concerns after discovering that earlier warnings led nowhere. All three may still attend meetings, accept tasks and speak positively about the project. Their behaviour can continue to resemble commitment long after their expectations about success have diverged.
Leaders who rely heavily on visible energy to judge the health of an initiative may overlook signs that the organisation is struggling to turn agreement into action. The absence of open resistance can look reassuring. High participation can appear to confirm that the change is progressing. Yet neither reveals whether important decisions are being made, conflicts between responsibilities are being resolved or the necessary resources are actually available.
Motivation remains valuable. Teams that believe in what they are doing may be more willing to learn, cooperate and persist through difficulties. But motivation cannot settle a dispute over decision rights, create working hours that have already been allocated elsewhere or give a manager authority that the organisation has not granted.
When a project is described as having lost momentum, I would want to know what people were actually able to do after the launch. Could they make the decisions their new responsibilities required? Had anyone removed existing work to create room for the initiative? Were concerns about feasibility discussed while there was still time to change the plan?
Those questions may produce a less impressive account than the enthusiasm recorded at the kickoff. They also offer a better chance of understanding why the work has stalled. The team may still believe in the initiative just as strongly as it did at the beginning, while waiting for decisions the organisation has yet to make.
References
Fredberg, T., & Pregmark, J. (2022). Organizational transformation: Handling the double-edged sword of urgency. Long Range Planning, 55(2), Article 102091.
Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 79–107.
Siemsen, E., Roth, A., & Balasubramanian, S. (2008). How motivation, opportunity, and ability drive knowledge sharing: The constraining-factor model. Journal of Operations Management, 26(3), 426–445.
Sleesman, D. J., Conlon, D. E., McNamara, G., & Miles, J. E. (2012). Cleaning up the big muddy: A meta-analytic review of the determinants of escalation of commitment. Academy of Management Journal, 55(3), 541–562.
Westphal, J. D., & Bednar, M. K. (2005). Pluralistic ignorance in corporate boards and firms’ strategic persistence in response to low firm performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50(2), 262–298.