The core variable of team performance begins with trust-based communication between team leaders and members. [Photo = Korea Business Review Archive Photo]

The role of a team leader is increasingly being avoided. According to a 2025 survey on leader perception among 2030 office workers published by Daehak Naeil 20s Lab, 32.5% of workers aged 19 to 36 responded that they do not want a mid-level leadership position. Furthermore, 39.2% responded that they do not want to take on executive roles in the future.

The primary reasons for avoidance were increased workloads and the burden of performance accountability. Unlike previous generations whose goal was unconditional promotion, many of today's office workers view the team leader role itself as a burden.

This phenomenon cannot be explained by generational shifts alone. It is because the role of a team leader has genuinely become more complex and difficult.

Performance is demanded from above, while communication and consideration are required from below. Leaders must achieve organizational goals while protecting the autonomy and psychological stability of members.

Public data points to what actually works in this position.

What the Figure Implying That Managers Account for at Least 70% of Variance in Team Engagement Suggests

Gallup's research provides the starting figure for this topic.

Through "State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders," Gallup analyzed that managers (team leaders) account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Subsequent global reports by Gallup continue to reaffirm this figure. Gallup specifies that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager (team leader) as one of its most critical findings.

The implication of this figure is specific. The core takeaway of Gallup's research is that if you know who an employee's manager is, you can predict their engagement level with considerable accuracy. It is not salary, benefits, or the company's mission statement, but the manager that is key.

The problem is that the team leaders themselves are burning out. According to Gallup's "State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report" (based on 2024 data), manager engagement fell 3 percentage points from 30% in 2023 to 27% in 2024. The drop was particularly steep for managers under 35, whose engagement fell by 5 percentage points, and female managers, whose engagement dropped by 7 percentage points. And Gallup connects the result directly: when managers are not engaged, neither is the team.

South Korea's figures read even heavier in this context. According to Gallup's "State of Global Workplaces (2024)," South Korean workers' engagement (Engaged percentage) stood at 13.8%, falling short of both the global average of 21% and the East Asian regional average of 18%. Connected with Gallup's research that a manager's role accounts for at least 70% of team engagement variance, one can gauge how heavily the room for improvement in domestic organizational engagement depends on strengthening team leaders' competencies.

 Conditions Members Actually Want in a Leader: Communication and People Management

The 2025 HRD Trend Report published by the Korea Productivity Center (KPC) numerically demonstrates the competencies required of leaders based on a survey of office workers. In a multiple-response item asking about "training needed for my leader (boss)," organizational management (57%) and people management (52%) took 1st and 2nd place. The need for change management (37%) and performance management (34%) training also recorded response rates of over 30%.

The direction pointed to by these results is clear. Members expect the ability to handle people from their team leaders before strategic insight. The KPC's 2024 HRD Trend Report expresses this context more directly. Communication training was chosen as the number one "training leaders should take."

The report emphasizes the importance of communication competency based on research findings that a leader's active listening and empathy give members 'psychological safety'—the belief that they will not face disadvantages no matter what opinions they present—and that this positively affects followers' organizational engagement and performance.

A team leader's communication is not about "creating a good atmosphere." It is the act of designing the foundation of psychological safety directly tied to performance. That is the significance of the KPC report compiling this as the top priority.

Why Building Psychological Safety Is a Core Role of the Team Leader

Psychological safety refers to the belief that members will not be punished when they voice opinions or admit mistakes.

Google pointed to psychological safety as the most critical factor distinguishing high-performing teams from low-performing teams through "Project Aristotle," which analyzed about 180 teams over roughly four years starting in 2012. This research has since become one of the most widely cited cases in the field of organizational psychology.

Domestic data confirms the same direction. In the organizational culture-related survey (multiple responses) of the KPC "2025 HRD Trend Report," "building psychological safety within the organization" was ranked as the 5th priority with a 34% response rate, and ranks 1st through 5th all recorded response rates of over 30%, showing high interest in the overall organizational culture.

Organizational research by global consulting firm McKinsey points to the same conclusion. According to McKinsey surveys, respondents answered that not many leaders actually display behaviors that build psychological safety. The research stated that a team atmosphere where psychological safety is built can be formed through supportive and consultative leadership rather than authoritative leadership.

Psychological safety is not a matter of a team leader's personality or style. It is the task of structurally designing an environment where members can speak up, learn, and take on challenges. Various studies repeatedly emphasize that the responsibility for creating this environment lies with the team leader.

Experiments conducted by behavioral scientists at global pharmaceutical company Novartis empirically support this direction. In this study involving over 1,000 teams and roughly 7,000 people, the results of a group of team leaders instructed to conduct 1:1 meetings focused on team members' personal needs and interests rather than business improvements were analyzed.

Team members in the group that used the meeting method focused on personal needs showed a more than 12% improvement in psychological safety, a 21% improvement in perceptions of career development and growth, and a 15% improvement in role model perceptions of their team leader compared to the control group.

This experiment demonstrates that a team leader paying attention to individual team members before business instructions ultimately leads to better results across multiple aspects, including performance metrics.

The Role of Explaining Change and Communicating Direction: The Ability to Reduce Information Gaps

The "Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2024" published by PwC in June 2024 is a survey conducted on approximately 56,000 workers across 50 countries and regions. In this survey, more than half of the respondents felt that too many changes were happening all at once in the workplace, and 44% answered that they did not understand why the changes were necessary.

Change itself is not the problem. Not knowing the reason for change is the problem. In the same survey, 62% of respondents answered that they experienced more changes in the workplace over the past year than in the preceding 12 months, and two-fifths (40%) responded that their daily work responsibilities had changed significantly or extremely.

The PwC report specifies that the role of bridging this gap lies with leaders. Helping employees understand why change is necessary and how they can contribute should be the starting point for leaders, and transparent leadership can foster employees with the enthusiasm to turn vision into reality, the report explains.

Creating strategy is the executive team's job. Translating and communicating it in a language team members can understand is what team leaders must do. Without this translation ability, change is only received as anxiety. The report concludes that innovation plans are difficult to succeed unless employees understand change and lead it themselves.

The Role of Designing and Persuading Fair Evaluations

Fairness in evaluation is a prerequisite for maintaining members' engagement. The KPC "2024 HRD Trend Report" specifies this.

While emphasizing that fair evaluations must precede employee retention and engagement, the report presumes that perfect fairness is difficult to establish because evaluation criteria vary, target difficulty levels differ by organizational unit, and there are differences in members' job levels. However, it explains that it is possible to make people understand and accept the results a bit more.

The same report presents data-driven HR management as the approach direction for this issue.

Equipping a system that evaluates based on observable behaviors and results, rather than subjective impressions, is a practical condition required of team leaders.

When a process of sharing evaluation criteria in advance and explaining the basis for results in detail is included, members can accept evaluations as feedback for growth.

How to Handle the Intergenerational Gap: Design Starting from Perception Differences

The KPC "2024 HRD Trend Report" selected resolving generational differences and conflicts as one of the priority tasks related to organizational culture, and analyzed that as Generation Z enters organizations in earnest, promoting intergenerational understanding and communication is becoming even more important.

Most people in team leader positions are Millennials or older generations. Conversely, the proportion of Generation Z among team members is rising. This gap is not simply an age difference. The criteria for choosing a job, the way performance is measured, the format of communication, and the method of accepting feedback differ. If team leaders operate teams only through their own experiential framework, this gap becomes friction.

In the 2025 survey by Daehak Naeil 20s Lab, 2030 office workers selected "communication and strengthening teamwork" as the core role of mid-level managers, and 70.6% responded that mid-level managers' leadership competencies have a large impact on organizational culture. The priority that members themselves expect from team leaders is not performance pressure, but the creation of an atmosphere of communication and cooperation.

The Role of Cultivating Resilience Within the Team

PwC's 2024 survey asks another role of team leaders. As the pace of change is unlikely to slow down in the future, leaders must help employees adapt better to change. Innovative leadership that inspires and empowers others to embrace change is needed, and this approach helps employees build resilience to navigate uncertainty.

Resilience is not merely an individual member's psychological resource. It is also a team-level response capability. Team members observe how team leaders react in pressure situations and how they handle failure. When team leaders make stable judgments in the face of change and shocks, and reconnect roles and meaning to team members, the resilience of the entire team increases.

The report also points out that this role is not just an individual competency issue. While it is important to foster resilience across the organization, senior leaders must support middle managers themselves in developing resilience and fostering it within their teams, the report specifies. This means that a team leader's own resilience is a prerequisite, and it should not be entirely passed on to the individual without organizational-level support.

Three Criteria Leaders Must Check Last

Synthesizing data from Gallup, PwC, and KPC, a flow where the team leader role shifts from direction-and-management centered to environment-design and support centered is observed. Organized as criteria to check in practice, this compresses into three points.

First, is it an environment where members can speak up? Checking whether differing opinions emerge in meetings, whether mistakes are not hidden, and whether feedback flows in both directions is the beginning. If this does not work, it is a signal that there is no psychological safety.

Second, are you explaining change and direction concretely? Rather than delivering messages by saying "Management said so," leaders must be able to explain why this direction is chosen and what each person's role is. As verified in the PwC survey, members who do not understand the reasons for change cannot become the driving force of change.

Third, are evaluation criteria shared in advance? Criteria rather than results should be shared first, and there must be a process of explaining the grounds after evaluation. The more this process is repeated, the more members accept evaluations as feedback for growth rather than judgment.

A great team leader is not someone who moves the team. They are someone who designs an environment where the team can move itself. Creating this environment is the most practical role required in this position today.

KBR Insight

Public data from Gallup, PwC, KPC, and others point to one common direction.

The core variable of team performance is the team leader, and the team leader's role is shifting from giving instructions to environment design. The competencies requested by members from team leaders are communication and people management, and the roles requested by organizations from team leaders are creating psychological safety and explaining change.

The point CEOs and C-suites must check is whether they are utilizing team leaders as transmitters of performance pressure or supporting them as designers of the environment where teams operate. If team leaders are not provided with sufficient authority and context, the costs of declining engagement and talent turnover are distributed across the entire organization.