Disengagement Is a Part of Engagement

You’ve moved between industry roles at Cyient and ZingHR, a full-time parenting break, and now a decade in academia, culminating in a PhD from IIM Tiruchirappalli. What pulled you back towards research each time, rather than staying purely in practice?

Honestly, it was always the questions. Every time I worked in practice, I would run into puzzles that practice itself could not answer. As a consultant, you are rewarded for solving the immediate problem and moving on. But I kept getting stuck on the ‘why’. Why do two teams with identical tools and policies experience work so differently? Why does an engagement initiative energise one group and exhaust another? Practice gives you the puzzle; research gives you the patience and the tools to sit with it long enough to understand it.

My doctoral work at IIM Tiruchirappalli actually began inside industry, with a phenomenological study of global virtual teams at Cyient. So for me, the two worlds were never really separate. Consulting kept my research honest, and research made my consulting more than a set of borrowed frameworks.

The parenting break taught me something neither world had: what energy and attention really mean when they are genuinely scarce. Full-time parenting was, in its own way, the most demanding engagement study I have ever conducted: a child does not accept partial presence, and you learn very quickly the difference between being available and being truly engaged. It also taught me that stepping away does not diminish you; I came back with sharper questions and a far deeper respect for recovery than any literature review had given me. Returning to research after that break was not a retreat from practice. It was a recognition that the questions I cared about — engagement, energy and the human experience of work — needed sustained inquiry, not quick answers. Academia lets me hold a question for years.

Your Buzz to Burnout paper started as an idea in 2017, got a standing ovation at the Academy of Management in 2019, and was only published in 2025. What kept you committed to that one idea for almost a decade?

Conviction, mostly. And the uncomfortable feeling that the idea kept becoming more true every year I waited.

The paper argues that employee engagement, a concept that began with William Kahn’s beautiful idea of people bringing their full, authentic selves to work, has been slowly co-opted into a managerial tool that celebrates the very behaviours we would otherwise diagnose as workaholism. When you make an argument like that, you are challenging a construct that an entire industry of surveys, consultants and dashboards is built upon. Reviewers do not receive that warmly.

In effect, Buzz to Burnout was saying ‘no’ to nearly 30 years of accepted definitions of engagement, academic and practitioner alike, from the instruments of the survey industry to constructs my own discipline had spent entire careers refining. Challenging that consensus meant roadblocks at every stage: desk rejections, sceptical reviews and well-meaning advice to soften the argument into something more comfortable and more publishable. The contrast could not have been sharper: at the Academy of Management in Boston in 2019, the paper received a standing ovation, and fellow scholars called it a ‘rockstar paper’. But reality hit hard the moment I began sending it to journals; the same argument that had a conference hall on its feet was met with rejection letters and bruising reviews. The rejections were not telling me the idea was wrong; they were telling me the field was not ready to hear it, which meant I had to keep sharpening the argument until it could not be dismissed. But through every setback I was clear about one thing: I wanted this idea out in the world, in its honest form, however long that took.

What sustained me was the world outside the journals. Between 2017 and 2025, we watched hustle culture get glorified, the pandemic dissolve the boundary between home and work, and ‘quiet quitting’ become a moral panic. Every one of those moments confirmed the thesis. The reception at the Academy of Management in 2019 told me practitioners and scholars felt the tension too, even if the literature had not yet named it. A decade sounds long, but some ideas need time to ripen. I would rather publish one idea I still believe in ten years later than ten ideas I have forgotten.

Your work traces how ‘employee engagement’, once about presence and authenticity, slowly absorbed the exact markers used to diagnose workaholism. When did you first notice that conceptual drift was happening in real workplaces, not just in the literature?

During my fieldwork, around 2017. I was studying global virtual teams, sitting in on conversations across time zones, and I began noticing the language managers used. The team members described as ‘highly engaged’ were almost always the ones who answered messages at midnight, joined calls on holidays and never seemed to switch off. Availability had quietly become the visible proxy for engagement. Nobody was being malicious; managers genuinely believed they were praising commitment. But the markers they were rewarding — the inability to detach, working beyond hours, guilt when not working — are precisely the markers researchers use to identify workaholism.

The literature caught up with me later. When we did the archaeology of the concept for the Buzz to Burnout paper, we could see the drift happening in the texts themselves: Kahn’s original 1990 formulation treats disengagement as a natural, even protective, counterpart of engagement. The later practitioner-driven conceptualisations dropped that entirely. Engagement became a state you were supposed to sustain permanently, and disengagement became a problem to be fixed. Once business outcomes became the reason for engagement, more of it was always better, and there was no conceptual brake left in the system. So the honest answer is, I saw it in the field first, in the small everyday compliments. ‘She is always on.’ ‘He never says no.’ When your best praise is indistinguishable from a symptom, the drift has already happened.

Your Balanced Employee Engagement (BEE) model treats disengagement as a precondition for sustainable engagement, not its opposite. How should a manager reading that for the first time change how they run a team?

The first change is perceptual: stop reading detachment as a warning sign. When a team member is offline in the evening, takes their full leave or says no to a stretch assignment, that is not the beginning of disengagement in the negative sense. That is the recovery that makes tomorrow’s engagement possible. Kahn understood this from the start; we have simply forgotten it.

But let me first say why I believe this matters far more today than it did even five years ago: modern work has lost its natural ending. There is no factory whistle, no closing bell. The office now lives in our pockets, and every evening is a potential extension of the workday. Derek Thompson captured the cultural half of this in his much-discussed The Atlantic essay on workism, where he argued that for the educated elite, work has morphed into a kind of religion, promising identity, transcendence and community, and delivering, quite often, exhaustion instead.

Cal Newport documented the technological half in The New Yorker, about the ‘hyperactive hive mind’ of constant messages measurably raising stress and lowering happiness; in his words, we have ‘accidentally deployed a literally inhumane way to collaborate.’ Put those two together — a culture that worships work and a technology that never lets it end — and you see why balance will not emerge on its own. When work has no terminus, disengagement has to be designed into work, deliberately and structurally. That is precisely what BEE asks organisations to do. It is no longer a philosophical nicety; it is the precondition for a workforce that lasts.

Practically, I would ask managers to do three things. First, build legitimate disengagement into the rhythm of work rather than leaving it to individual courage. Protected focus time, meeting-free blocks, real boundaries around after-hours communication. If recovery depends on an employee’s willingness to defy the culture, only the brave will recover. Second, look critically at what your engagement metrics actually reward. If your ‘most engaged’ scores consistently belong to people heading towards exhaustion, your instrument is measuring compliance and overwork, not engagement. Third, change what you praise. The moment you stop celebrating the midnight email, the midnight emails stop.

And a caution: BEE is not a licence for disengagement as an end state. It is a both-and model, employee-centric and organisation-centric at once. The goal is oscillation, the way an athlete alternates training and rest. No coach would call rest a betrayal of performance. Managers should extend their teams the same logic.

Your TRACES framework and your California Management Review piece both address trust and burnout in an always-on digital world. What’s the most common mistake you see organisations make when they try to fix ‘digital burnout’?

They treat a work-design problem as an employee-resilience problem. This is what I call the Burnout 1.0 reflex applied to a Burnout 2.0 reality. The old burnout came from long hours and physical strain, so the remedies were rest, wellness programmes and benefits. Today’s exhaustion comes from temporal fragmentation, algorithmic intensification and dissolved boundaries — 60 notifications before lunch, dashboards demanding immediate action, and the workday bleeding into the night. You cannot fix that with a yoga session and a meditation app. The employee returns from the wellness webinar to the same 40 notifications that caused the problem.

The second mistake is my favourite irony: organisations try to solve tool overload by adding another tool. A new wellbeing platform, a new dashboard to monitor stress. More monitoring to fix the effects of monitoring.

Which brings me to trust. In the TRACES work, I argue that digital oversight itself has become a hidden energy drain. When people know they are being watched by systems that are rich in data but poor in context, they perform visibility instead of doing meaningful work, and that performance is exhausting. Employers call it accountability; employees call it surveillance, and both are describing the same dashboard. The way out is not abandoning the tools but redesigning the relationship around them: transparency about what is tracked and why, co-creation of the norms, empathy in interpretation, and a shared purpose that makes oversight legible. Fix the work, not the worker. Leaders need to stop being enforcers of productivity and become architects of energy.

Beyond engagement, you’ve written teaching cases like the Amara Raja Group studies and researched global virtual teams and cultural intelligence. How does writing a business case change the way you think as a researcher, compared with writing a journal article?

A journal article rewards abstraction; a case punishes it. When I write for a journal, my job is to strip away the particulars until a generalisable pattern remains. When I wrote the Amara Raja cases with Professor Biju Varkkey, the job was the opposite: keep the mess. The personalities, the family-business dynamics, the half-finished transformation, the decision that had to be made on a Tuesday with incomplete information. A case has a protagonist standing at a fork in the road, and you must leave the fork open. That discipline, resisting the urge to resolve, is deeply healthy for a researcher, because theory tempts you to believe the world is tidier than it is.

Cases also change your relationship with evidence. A reviewer asks whether your construct is valid; a hall full of MBA students asks whether your protagonist’s dilemma is real. Students detect artificiality instantly. If the case does not breathe, the discussion dies. Writing the Cyient case on engaging virtual teams during uncertain times taught me things my own journal papers on virtual teams had not, because I had to narrate engagement as it is lived week to week, not as it is measured. So now the two feed each other. Fieldwork gives me cases; cases expose the gaps in my theories; the gaps become the next paper. I would tell every doctoral student: write at least one case. It is the best vaccine against falling in love with your own framework.

If you had to bet on where ‘employee engagement’ as a field goes next, given AI, algorithmic management and the right to disconnect debate, what’s the theory or framework that becomes obsolete, and what replaces it?

My bet: the sustained-state model of engagement becomes obsolete, the idea that engagement is a stable individual attitude, measured by an annual survey, where more is always better. That model made sense when work had a stable shape. It does not survive contact with a workday that is fragmented into micro-tasks, mediated by algorithms and continuously nudged by dashboards.

What replaces it, I believe, is a temporal and episodic understanding of engagement. Engagement as a rhythm rather than a level; something that ebbs and flows across a day, that is shaped by the technologies we work through, not just the attitudes we bring. This type of engagement treats the design of digital work — the notifications, the monitoring, the meeting structures — as part of the phenomenon itself rather than as background noise. The unit of analysis shifts from the employee’s mindset to the sociomaterial system the employee works within.

The economics of AI will accelerate this reckoning. The Atlantic recently ran a cover story drawing on conversations with dozens of economists and technologists about white-collar automation. Whichever side of that debate proves right, one thing seems clear to me: the humans who remain will be working alongside systems that never tire, never detach and never need recovery. If organisations let the machine’s rhythm become the human’s benchmark, engagement will be redefined as perpetual availability, and Burnout 2.0 will look gentle in retrospect. The right to disconnect debate is the political counterweight to exactly this pressure: once law starts protecting disengagement, organisations can no longer define engagement as unbroken availability.

AI sharpens the measurement problem too. Algorithmic management can now demand engagement-like behaviour, responsiveness and visible activity at machine speed, which makes the gap between looking engaged and being engaged wider than ever. The field will have to choose which one it wants to study. The frameworks that survive will be the ones that can tell the difference.

Ten years from now, what would it mean for your BEE model to have actually succeeded, not just in journals, but in how companies operate?

The truest sign of success would be that the word ‘balanced’ becomes redundant, that when a manager says ‘engaged’, balance is already implied, the way ‘healthy’ implies both activity and rest.

Concretely, I would look for a few things. Engagement dashboards that report recovery alongside effort, where a team that fully disconnects on weekends scores better, not worse. Managers who see an employee offline at 9 pm and assume recovery rather than shirking. Appraisal conversations where ‘she protects her team’s boundaries’ is a leadership strength, not a euphemism for low ambition. And engagement surveys that have a conceptual brake built in, instruments that can distinguish a thriving employee from a workaholic one, instead of scoring them identically as they largely do today.

But I want to be realistic about the timeline. Ideas travel faster than cultures change. It took our paper nearly a decade to move from an uncomfortable observation to a published argument; it will take at least another generation for the culture of organisations to genuinely accept that disengagement is a part of engagement. Acceptance of a culture always takes time, and it rarely comes from the people who built the old one. Which is why I believe the near future of BEE is in the hands of new faces, the students reading this magazine, the future leaders.

You are entering organisations at the precise moment when the old bargain is being renegotiated, when AI is redrawing what work is, and when ‘always-on’ is still a choice rather than a settled fact. In a few years, you will be the ones designing the engagement surveys, setting the team norms, deciding what gets praised in appraisals. So my honest message to Xplore’s readers is this: take the reins. You get to decide what is more important, engagement scores or employee energy, visible busyness or meaningful contribution, and whether sustainable engagement and sustainable business are treated as trade-offs or recognised as the same thing.

And if a decade from now some HR manager quietly cancels an initiative because it optimises engagement scores at the cost of employee energy, and cites the distinction as obvious common sense, I will know the idea has succeeded. When an idea stops needing its citation, it has truly won. Kahn gave us the idea in 1990. My work has only been an attempt to give it back its other half. Carrying it forward is now a shared project.

Availability had quietly become the visible proxy for engagement. Managers were rewarding the inability to detach, working beyond hours and guilt when not working — precisely the markers of workaholism

When your best praise is indistinguishable from a symptom, the drift has already happened

When work has no terminus, disengagement has to be designed into work, deliberately and structurally