Do you ever have mixed feelings about work? You're not alone!

Authored by: Dr Esme Franken and Professor Ben Farr-Wharton

The past three decades have seen workplace language shift from employee wellbeing, to engagement, resilience, productivity, motivation, and now: psychosocial safety. Each of these concepts matters, and each has contributed something valuable to how we understand work. However, part of the challenge may lie in our tendency to focus on one idea at a time, rather than recognising how deeply interconnected they are — and how limited single-focus solutions can be when applied to complex workforce challenges.

In our recent research on public sector workers in Australia and New Zealand, we took a different approach. Rather than examining a focal outcome or driver in isolation, we explored how a range of employee sentiments and motivations interact and cluster together. In other words, we moved beyond the question of whether employees are motivated — because, as previous research consistently shows, most public servants, and indeed many workers, are. Instead, we examined how motivation is experienced differently, particularly in relation to employees' broader emotional responses to their work and work environment.

To guide this work, we drew on the Circumplex Model of Affect (CMA), which recognises that emotions are not discrete or isolated, but overlapping, dynamic, and often difficult to neatly categorise. While we like to think emotions are like fruit – experiencing one at a time, in actuality they are more like a colour palate – often mixed and smeared together to create weird and wonderful textures. This perspective reflects the lived reality of work more accurately than frameworks that treat emotions as singular or static states. We focused on public service motivation as our core concept, which is already known to be complex and counterintuitive. For example, highly motivated employees are sometimes more likely to leave their organisations, particularly in the context of poor work environments or limited support, simply because they want to 'do more'.

This raises an important question: how can motivation lead to turnover when it is typically assumed to be beneficial for both employees and organisations? By viewing public service motivation through the lens of CMA, we examined how different emotional states cluster together and how they are shaped by workplace conditions. This allowed us to better understand not just whether employees are motivated, but how that motivation is experienced, as well as what it leads to.

Our study used a mixed-methods design. We began with qualitative data from 29 public servants across policy, frontline, and operational roles to understand how motivation is experienced in practice. We then tested these patterns using survey data from 222 public servants across Australia and New Zealand.

We identified four distinct profiles of public service motivation and affect, demonstrating that public servants often experience complex and mixed emotions about their work — rather than fitting neatly into simple categories such as "engaged" or "disengaged".

The first and most common profile, which we labelled "Enacted", represents employees who are energised and purpose-driven. They are highly motivated to serve the public, strongly committed to their organisation, satisfied in their work, and unlikely to leave. Encouragingly, this group made up 55% of our sample, suggesting that many public servants are indeed thriving in their roles.

However, the remaining profiles paint a more complicated (and more instructive) picture.

The second largest group (27%), "Motivated and Coping", was in fact the most motivated. However, they reported only moderate satisfaction and commitment, alongside relatively high intentions to leave. These employees are at a tipping point: they have strong potential and a genuine desire to contribute, but without adequate support, are at risk of poorer outcomes. They are motivated to make a difference but are increasingly looking elsewhere to do so.

A smaller group (14%), labelled "Resigned", showed low motivation, low engagement, and weaker satisfaction and commitment, yet were unlikely to leave their organisation. This group appears emotionally neutral — not highly driven, but not under significant strain either. From an organisational perspective, this may represent a quieter challenge: employees who are "coasting", but who could potentially be re-engaged with the right support and opportunities.

The smallest but most concerning group (4%), "Thwarted", were highly motivated yet dissatisfied, uncommitted, and highly likely to leave within six months. In these cases, motivation is effectively wasted: employees still care deeply about their work but feel unable to enact that motivation within their current environment. This highlights a critical risk for organisations — not just losing staff but losing some of their most motivated people.

We then examined how these profiles differed in terms of perceived organisational support. The Enacted group reported significantly higher levels of support than the other groups, suggesting that organisational context plays a critical role in shaping how motivation is experienced. In contrast, lower perceived support was associated with more strained and less sustainable motivational profiles.

We also explored work pace — how busy and challenged employees feel in their daily work. Interestingly, the Enacted group reported high work pace, suggesting that being busy is not inherently problematic when paired with strong support and positive affect. By contrast, the Resigned group reported low work pace, pointing to possible boredom or underutilisation. This reinforces the idea that both overload and underload can shape employee experience in important ways.

Taken together, these findings challenge the idea that focusing on a single concept — such as wellbeing, engagement, or motivation — will resolve complex workforce challenges. Employees do not experience these factors in isolation. Instead, they experience clusters of emotions and motivations that interact in meaningful and sometimes unexpected ways.

This means that a highly motivated employee may still want to leave, while another may be disengaged, yet remain in their role. It also highlights that the same work environment can be experienced very differently across employees.

If organisations are serious about improving workforce outcomes, they may benefit from moving beyond one-dimensional solutions, and instead recognise the complexity of employee experience.

Do you ever have mixed feelings about work? You're not alone! was published in The Mandarin on 23 April 2026.

The research article Public Service Motivation and the Circumplex Model of Affect: Profiling Australasian Public Servants is published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration.