Why More Autonomy at Work Doesn't Help Everyone Equally
We are told freedom at work makes people happier. A 2026 study suggests it depends on how you handle open-ended time: whether you tend to act or to deliberate.
Two people get the same email on the same Monday: "Starting next month, you set your own hours and decide how to run your projects." One of them closes the laptop at noon feeling lighter than they have in a year. The other spends the afternoon rereading the email, opening a blank document, and wondering why a gift feels so much like a weight.
I have been both of those people, sometimes in the same week. For years I assumed the second reaction was a character flaw. A 2026 paper in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, by Hohmann and Baumann, offers a more useful explanation: the benefit of autonomy depends on a personality dimension most of us have never been asked about.
What action-state orientation means
Action-state orientation comes out of Julius Kuhl's work on how people regulate themselves. It does not describe how motivated you are or how smart. It describes what your mind does in the gap between deciding what to do and actually doing it.
An action-oriented person tends to move from intention to behavior fairly smoothly. Faced with a plan, a setback or an unpleasant task, they disengage from the worry and start. A state-oriented person tends to stay with the state they are in: the unresolved options, the past mistake, the feeling about the task. They are not lazy. The mind keeps circling, and circling uses up the energy the doing would have needed.
As a software engineer I find a Java analogy helpful here. Think of two threads handed the same task. One runs straight through. The other keeps re-checking a lock it already holds. Both are correct programs; only one finishes quickly when nobody is scheduling it.
Why more autonomy doesn't uniformly help everyone
Self-determination research has long argued that people need to feel they are the source of their own actions, and that satisfying this need supports well-being. Hohmann and Baumann ask a sharper question: does that hold equally for everyone? Their argument, built on action-state orientation, is that it does not. Autonomy removes external structure, and external structure is exactly what some people lean on to get from deciding to doing.
I would read the finding with care, as I would read any single study. It is a statement about averages and about a particular kind of measurement, not a verdict on any individual. What the pattern says, as I understand it, is that the well-being payoff of feeling autonomous is not the same across orientations, and that the people who gain least are not failing at freedom. They are being handed a form of freedom that does not fit how their attention works.
That reframes the Monday email. The question was never whether autonomy is good. It is what kind of autonomy, with how much scaffolding.
A rough way to tell which type you lean toward
Researchers use validated questionnaires for this, and a few honest questions in a blog post are no substitute. Still, a rough reading is better than none. Answer from your ordinary weeks, not your best ones.
- When you finally decide on something, do you tend to start right away, or do you keep revisiting the decision?
- After a mistake or an awkward conversation, how long does it keep running in the background?
- When a task is boring or unpleasant, do you start it anyway, or does starting itself take a run-up?
- On a day with no meetings and no deadlines, do you feel expansive or slightly unmoored?
- When something goes wrong, is your first move to fix it or to understand why it happened?
If you mostly answered "start right away, let it go, fix it", you probably lean action-oriented. If you mostly answered "revisit, keeps running, understand first", you probably lean state-oriented. Most people are somewhere in between, and orientation shifts with stress. Under pressure nearly everyone drifts toward the state side.
Implications for remote and flexible work design
Flexible work policies are usually written as if the employee population were one person. Unlimited schedule choice, no fixed check-ins, goals set quarterly: this is a gift to one orientation and a quiet tax on the other. Teams then misread the result. The person who struggles gets labeled as less self-driven, when the design simply removed the supports their attention needed.
A more honest design offers choice inside a structure rather than instead of one. Fixed anchors (a short daily start, a weekly written plan, a clear definition of done) cost an action-oriented person very little and give a state-oriented person something to push off from. Autonomy over how and where, with light structure over when it is due, seems to be a reasonable default.
If you manage people, notice that asking everyone to self-organize in the same way is itself a choice with consequences. Ask each person what structure they would actually use.
Managing yourself differently depending on your orientation
If you lean action-oriented, your risk is the opposite one. You start quickly, so you can start the wrong thing, or push through signals that you should stop. Schedule a pause before big commitments. Put a recurring check in your week that asks, "Is this still the right thing?" Your freedom needs a brake more than a scaffold.
If you lean state-oriented, borrow structure deliberately:
- Decide the first physical step the night before, and make it small enough to be almost silly.
- Set a time-box for a decision and write down what you chose, so the question stops reopening itself.
- Use another person as a rhythm: a co-working call, a daily one-line message to a colleague.
- When you catch the mind circling a mistake, switch to something with your hands for ten minutes before trying to think it through.
I practice Heartfulness meditation, and one thing it has taught me is how much of my day passes in mental circling that I mistook for thinking. Sitting quietly does not remove that tendency, but it makes it visible sooner, which is half of managing it. That is my own experience, not a claim from the study.
A short self-check, with a tip for each type
Tonight, pick one task you have been avoiding. Notice what happens in your head when you imagine starting it. If the picture is "I know what to do, I just have to begin", you are probably leaning action. Your tip: spend two minutes asking whether it is the right task before you begin. If the picture is a loop of options, worries or old mistakes, you are probably leaning state. Your tip: pick the smallest first step, give it a clock, and tell someone.
Neither answer is a ranking. Both are information about how you are built, and information is what makes the next change in your working life a design choice rather than a mood.
FAQ
Is action-state orientation the same as being introverted or extroverted?
No. It describes how you regulate yourself between intending and doing, not how you gain energy from other people. An extrovert can be state-oriented and an introvert can be action-oriented.
Does this mean state-oriented people should avoid flexible work?
Not at all. It means flexibility works better when paired with some structure. Many state-oriented people thrive with freedom over where and how they work, as long as there are anchors for when.
Can my orientation change?
It shifts with context. Stress, fatigue and unclear goals push most people toward the state side, and practices like clear first steps and time-boxing can help you act more like an action-oriented person even if you do not become one.
Is one study enough to redesign how a team works?
It is enough to start asking better questions. Treat it as a reason to ask your team what structure helps them, then adjust based on what you observe.