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Flourishing or Languishing? What Gies Experts Say About Workplace Well-Being

A 2025 Workplace Well-Being Report from Gies College of Business found a divide in the American workforce: 57% of employees report that they're languishing at work, while only 43% are flourishing.

The report, coauthored by professor of business administration Oscar Ybarra and released from the Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society, provides a clearer picture of what's been driving disengagement and what leaders can do to push back.

Languishing, the report clarifies, means consistently struggling with motivation, engagement, and fulfillment at work. Workplaces thrive when they create empowered environments. Employees with the autonomy to make decisions and the support systems to back up those decisions are more likely to flourish.

Data is one thing, but solutions are another. Gies experts Elizabeth Luckman, a leadership educator and coach helping organizations empower people and solve problems, and Dylan Nelson, a researcher focused on how company structures shape employee well-being, explored the report and offered complementary perspectives on how leaders can forge flourishing workplaces.

"It's About Trust"

For Elizabeth Luckman, clinical associate professor of business administration who teaches Gies’ core leadership courses, the report's findings on empowered, supported teams reflect what she sees in practice.

"Honestly, I think I could boil 90% of my work down to this: it's about trust," Luckman said. "When you establish a foundational level of trust, that makes hard things easier. You have that sense of autonomy in your job."

In Luckman's view, empowerment is often misunderstood. Autonomy arises from real supports, and without those supports, employees can languish.

"Real empowerment is when you can speak up, propose a different way of doing things, and know you can do that safely," she explained. "That sense of safety - being able to innovate and challenge ideas while knowing that someone has your back - is exactly where flourishing happens. Flourishing is not an individual endeavor."

The report backs this up: employees that feel empowered, with high autonomy and high support, are consistently the most likely to flourish. For Luckman, this means investing in skills and leadership development long before employees climb high up the ladder.

"Imagine if instead of just sending all of your senior people out for leadership retreats, we invested early," she said. "Coaching, peer conversations, and learning spaces shouldn't be reserved for executives. They're what help people thrive earlier in their careers."

The Real Costs Are Hidden

While Luckman focuses on the personal and cultural dynamics that make empowerment possible, Dylan Nelson examines the broader organizational stakes when companies fail to act. Nelson, who studies how ownership structures - including private equity buyouts - shape employee well-being and performance, offers insight into the micro- and macro-level consequences of languishing.

"Languishing presents an opportunity for other employers to attract talented employees," said Nelson, assistant professor of business administration.

Supporting mental well-being can be a valued workplace benefit, and competitors can leverage it to poach talent from firms where employees feel stuck. At the same time, Nelson added that languishing is just as costly for the current employer.

"Employees who are languishing are likely disengaged from operational goals or investing in skills and relationships that can benefit the company,” he said. “That includes both general workplace skills and the kind of 'company-specific' skills that form the basis of shared value creation."

In other words, disengagement compounds over time. When employees languish companies risk turnover, innovation, institutional knowledge, and future productivity.

"The real cost isn't just in the increased rates of exit," Nelson added. "It's especially difficult in knowledge-intensive industries, where it's harder to measure productivity and even harder to measure the positive impact of reduced languishing."

Both Luckman and Nelson stress that cultivating flourishing workplaces isn't simple, but the report provides a path forward.

"My sense from this report is the people who are really flourishing get that part of it is on them," said Luckman. "You own your career. No one's going to sprinkle magic fairy dust and make it good or bad. Imagine how wonderful it could be if everyone was navigating these changes to get better together."

For Nelson, broader structural choices also matter. His ongoing work explores how organizational purpose shapes an employee's subjective outlook on their work.

"Employer characteristics, especially in ownership structure, play a role," said Nelson. "Our work on private equity buyouts raises the idea that employees' sense of the justification of organizational changes impacts their subjective well-being and their attachment to company goals."

Flourishing happens at the point where individual effort, team dynamics, and organizational support align.

A Call To Action

The Workplace Well-Being Report offers a clear message: flourishing isn't a matter of chance. It arises when organizations intentionally design for it. Intentional leaders foster the culture of an “empowered" team, where high agency is paired with high support.

That culture allows organizations to build on foundations of trust, training, and purpose. Leaders can ignore languishing and risk losing talent and innovation, or they can invest in flourishing, creating cultures where employees grow alongside the organization.

"We have the right to do good work and enjoy doing it," said Luckman. "So much of our lives are dedicated to the work that we do. We're going to work. Let's find a way to build it into our lives in a way that makes us interesting, whole people."

Nelson agrees that flourishing requires training leaders to recognize the early signs of detachment and make corrections.

"Everyone wants a good boss who will support them, though that's defined differently across occupations and industries," Nelson said. "I think this report reflects a lack of focus in training supervisors to monitor worker languishing and strategically intervene with the support of the company where necessary."

The report posits a challenge to leaders: Are you designing for flourishing?

 

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