BY MICHAEL LaGIER
Lights, camera, action. In more and more workplaces, leaders unintentionally reward visible busyness over meaningful results, a dynamic often called productivity theater, a term popularized by organizational psychologist Adam Grant. In colleges and universities, this phenomenon can be especially damaging. When faculty and staff are evaluated primarily on how much they appear to be doing rather than on the quality and impact of their work, institutions risk undermining morale, eroding trust, and potentially compromising student success.
Higher education has always involved a mix of visible and invisible labor. Faculty members spend hours preparing lectures, mentoring students, designing assessments, revising curricula, conducting research, and engaging in service work. Much of this labor is quiet, reflective, and iterative. However, in environments shaped by productivity theater, emphasis shifts toward quantifiable and visible markers: number of meetings attended, number of quasi-social events attended, emails sent, emails responded to in the dead of night, committees served on, or rapid turnaround on deliverables. The AAUP has long emphasized that meaningful faculty evaluation must account for the depth and rigor of teaching, scholarship, and service, not merely based on volume of activity. When institutions drift toward measuring what is most visible rather than what is most valuable, quality can suffer.
Research from Gallup shows that employee engagement, characterized by purpose, clarity, and recognition of meaningful contributions, is strongly tied to performance outcomes. When employees feel pressure to constantly demonstrate activity, they often prioritize speed over thoughtfulness. Faculty may rush course revisions or avoid pedagogical innovation because experimentation requires time and reflection. Staff may focus on producing deliverables quickly rather than ensuring they are strategically aligned or sustainable. Left unchecked, this can lead to superficial initiatives (that often fail and are quickly abandoned) and inefficiencies that fail to meet student needs and strategic goals.
Employee morale can also suffer. Productivity theater creates an atmosphere of performative busyness, where individuals feel compelled to signal effort rather than pursue meaningful progress. Research on employee burnout by Christina Maslach, whose work underpins the Maslach Burnout Inventory, demonstrates that chronic workplace stress intensifies when effort feels disconnected from meaningful accomplishment. In academic settings, when recognition or advancement hinges more on visibility than substance, cynicism grows and trust in leadership can erode.
The World Health Organization has formally recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterized by exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. In higher education, where workloads are already mentally and often emotionally taxing, the expectation of constant demonstrable activity compounds stress. Endless meetings, after-hours email responsiveness, coming to work physically “just to be there,” and service commitments can crowd out time for deep intellectual work. Burned-out employees are less innovative, less patient with students and peers, and more likely to leave, resulting in costly turnover and loss of institutional knowledge and wisdom.
In theory, there is no strong rationale as to why this effect cannot extend beyond employees to students. Colleges thrive when faculty and staff have the time and intellectual space to design meaningful learning experiences, create new student success initiatives, and mentor and support students robustly. When institutional culture prioritizes appearances and the rise of appearance-focused workers, the dilution of quality for quantity, and embracing presenteeism as the primary means for employees to be recognized as excellent in their perspective roles, students may experience college as an equally mediocre life experience, starved of the transformative experiences that distinguish excellent institutions.
Ultimately, productivity theater distorts institutional priorities. Leaders may favor highly visible, social media-ready, and optically pleasing initiatives (such as rapid program launches, rapid policy changes, or initiatives that cause a quick spike in dopamine) over long-term investments in key areas such as faculty development or infrastructure. While these actions can create the impression of momentum (and can grab the attention of boards and donors), they may not advance the institution’s core mission in terms of substantive and data-backed metrics. In part, by realigning evaluation systems and cultures to value quality over quantity, and by making academic leaders more aware of the potential costs of productivity theater, colleges can better fulfill their grandest of visions. Without such recalibration, colleges risk viewing institutional busyness through rose-colored glasses, mistaking random motion for momentum and activity for achievement.
Michael LaGier is professor of biology at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. In addition to teaching and research, Dr. LaGier has served in leadership roles including as a department chair and faculty senator. Most recently, Dr. LaGier has become certified in human resources (HRCI, PHR), with an emphasis on employee relations.
