When engagement becomes unreadable: organizational noise and the erosion of sustainable work relations

Abstract

Despite decades of sophisticated motivational practices, organizational investment in engagement continues to yield fragile outcomes. This article argues that the difficulty lies not in motivational scarcity but in the growing unreadability of contemporary work environments, with consequences for sustainable work practices. The analysis develops a conceptual and epistemic framework that shifts attention from activation-based models to the environmental conditions that enable employees to sustain meaningful and sustainable work. Difficulties in sustaining engagement derive less from motivational deficits than from cumulative cognitive, normative, procedural and symbolic interference, conceptualized as organizational noise. These forms of interference disrupt attention, sensemaking, and professional judgement, making it increasingly difficult for employees to determine what is important, coherent, and meaningful in their work. Employees struggle less with effort itself than with interpreting their work within environments characterized by competing signals, priorities, and expectations. As a conceptual article, the analysis does not provide empirical validation of the proposed framework. Nevertheless, it introduces organizational noise and negative (non-additive) human sustainability as new lenses for understanding engagement. By reframing engagement as a function of clarity rather than stimulation, the article identifies environmental legibility as a neglected condition of sustainable work and opens avenues for future research on organizational noise, sensemaking, and human sustainability. For employment relations and work design, the analysis suggests that sustainable engagement depends not only on organizational investment but also on the reduction of unnecessary background activity. The article advances an ecological reorientation of engagement research by explaining how saturated work environments erode interpretability. It identifies an epistemic blind spot in motivational and critical accounts and opens new avenues for understanding sustainable work in an interference-rich era through a clarity-centred analytical lens.