Keeping the Fire Alive: How to Motivate Your Human Rights / Social Performance Team When the Organisation Pushes Back
Dr Ana Maria Esteves and Dr Sérgio Moreira
There is a quiet paradox at the heart of social and human rights practice. The 2026 State of Social and Human Rights Practitioners (SSHRP) survey — the first global, systematic study of this professional cohort, drawing on 281 responses — found that 98% percent of practitioners score positively on a composite motivation index encompassing work identity, engagement, professional efficacy, and positive work-life spillover. Emotional pride in belonging to this profession averaged 4.4 on a 5-point scale, among the highest positive scores in the entire study. Overall, this means practitioners are deeply committed to the work they do.
And yet, the same study tells a sobering story. Thirty-three percent score either 0 or less negatively on a composite role experience index. Seventy-nine percent experience role stress at moderate to high levels; close to forty percent experience moderate to high role conflict; and thirty-one percent experience low role valuation. The takeaway is that people are still deriving purpose from their work even with dire role experiences – but for how long? Filling the gap between the meaning people find in their work and the conditions in which they do it is now more critical than ever, but it cannot be closed with a team-building day. It is structural, and it lives largely in the organisation around your team — which means it is, in part, within your power as a leader to address.
“People are still deriving purpose from their work even with dire role experiences – but for how long?”
What Actually Motivates Your Team (It Is Not What You Think)
One of the most striking findings is what does not drive professional outcomes – hours of work. Contracted and effective working hours have no meaningful correlation with any aspect of practitioner wellbeing, motivation, or role experience. Working longer does not produce better outcomes. What does matter is the presence of a self-reinforcing motivation cycle. The survey identifies a loop in which work engagement, professional identity, efficacy, and positive work-life spillover all reinforce each other. Your role as a leader is to nourish this motivation cycle and protect people from the ‘motivation killers’ the survey identifies — role ambiguity, role conflict, unreasonable demands, and inadequate resources.
This matters most for your less experienced colleagues. Practitioners aged 35 or younger report the lowest vigour scores (1.4 vs. 1.9 for those over 50 on a 3-point scale), the lowest happiness scores (4.0 vs. 4.1 on a 5-point scale), and the highest role ambiguity (2.6 vs. 2.1 for those over 50 on a 5-point scale). They arrive with strong values and high commitment — but are most vulnerable to having that motivation extinguished by unclear role expectations and the devaluation of their work. Protecting them means clarifying what success looks like, legitimizing their contribution publicly, and connecting them to the broader professional community.
“Your role as a leader is to nourish this motivation cycle and protect people from the ‘motivation killers’ (…). This matters most for your less experienced colleagues.”
The Organisational Culture Effect: The Most Powerful Lever You Have
The survey’s most consequential finding for leaders: organisational culture accounts for 40 percent of the variance in practitioners’ role experience. The culture around your team is not background context — it is the primary driver of whether your people thrive or suffer. The study identifies three organisational culture profiles across four dimensions (psychological safety, trust, reasonable demands, and adequate resources). Ninety-four percent of the professionals working in organisations categorised as ‘High Safety, Trust, and Balance’ report moderate to positive role experiences with only 6% reporting negative experiences. Comparatively, only 34% of the professionals working in ‘Low Safety, Trust, and Balance’ report moderate to positive role experiences, and 66% report negative experiences. In ‘High Safety, Trust, and Balance’ organisations (45 percent of the sample), role ambiguity averages 1.8, role conflict 2.2, role stress 3.0, and role valuation 4.0 on a 5-point scale. In ‘Low Safety, Trust, and Balance’ organisations (26 percent of the sample), role ambiguity rises to 2.9, role conflict to 3.3, role stress to 3.6, and role valuation falls to 2.7. The difference between these cultures is the difference between feeling recognised and feeling invisible.
For leaders wanting to strengthen their teamwork culture and wellbeing, good intentions won’t suffice! The survey points to four key levers. First, acknowledge ongoing role conflict. Define together with the team what success in human rights and SP work looks like — especially urgent in mining and metals, where role conflict is the highest of any sector. Second, make role valuation a priority. Upwards manage to integrate human rights and SP professionals into strategic decision-making, not just operational delivery. Third, map your team resources to demands. Creating a balance between demands and resources is fundamental to keep your team motivated and purpose driven. Fourth, embrace psychological safety. Create space for practitioners to speak up about their experiences, challenge the practice, and process difficult emotions without fear. One of the poorly assessed dimensions across the entire study is ‘faith’ — forward-looking trust in the organisation’s goodwill (average 3.0 on a 5-point scale). Psychological safety is particularly important when there are themes and conversations that feel uncomfortable to you as manager! Learn how to address these difficult conversations in a way that builds trust
“For leaders wanting to strengthen their teamwork culture and wellbeing, good intentions won’t suffice!”
When to Acknowledge That the Culture Cannot Be Fixed: Knowing When It Is Time to Leave
Not every organisational culture can be changed from within, and honest leadership requires acknowledging this. The SSHRP data offer a framework for identifying when a culture has crossed from ‘challenging’ to ‘unsustainable’ and is having long-lasting and hard to recover impacts that on your wellbeing. The survey’s single most sensitive indicator is emotional exhaustion — a dimension of burnout measured by the agreement with “My work is breaking me down.” This single item correlates with virtually every other variable in the model: health, happiness, role ambiguity and conflict, value congruence, psychological safety, and organisational trust. Signs of chronic emotional exhaustion – for example, experiencing several times a week ending the workday day feeling totally depleted, difficulty in recovering energy and motivation form one day to the next, or a permanent sense of needing a break to rest – signals that the entire professional system around a practitioner, and not merely their personal resilience, is failing and not supporting personal and professional wellbeing and fulfilment. Watch for it alongside three further signals:
“Signs of chronic emotional exhaustion signal that the entire professional system around a practitioner, and not merely their personal resilience, is failing”
Persistent role conflict with no institutional resolution: practitioners are routinely caught between community demands and leadership imperatives, with no framework for navigating the tension. The high scores (3.2 on a 5-point scale) on the survey item “I feel pulled between incompatible demands or expectations of my leadership and of affected communities” captures this precisely.
Structural devaluation with no leadership will to change it: the organisation consistently subordinates SP work to operational and technical priorities. The survey’s organisational approach measure — how far the organisation is ‘pressed to prioritise’ social and human rights issues — averages only 5.7 in mining and metals, the lowest of any sector. When this score sits persistently low and leadership shows no commitment to address it, the signal is clear.
Collapse of forward-looking trust: practitioners have lost confidence not just in present conditions but in the possibility of future change — and leaders cannot in good conscience contest that loss. The conditions for sustained motivation are absent.
Practitioners in low-culture organisations do not merely experience worse outcomes — they experience the systematic erosion of the motivation cycle that makes this work sustainable. Supporting a team member to recognise when an organisation is incompatible with their professional flourishing, and to make a different choice, is not a leadership failure. It is professional care that the data fully support.
What This Means for You as a Leader
The SSHRP survey confirms what experienced leaders in this field often sense but cannot always evidence: that practitioner commitment is a real and measurable professional asset that is at risk. Sixty-two percent sustain very high motivation levels despite conditions that would defeat most professionals. This is not a stable equilibrium — it is a slow accumulation of costs, one that reaches its breaking point most often among the younger and less experienced practitioners who carry the future of the profession.
The data offer a clear directive: name the work, value the people, fix the culture where you can, and be honest when you cannot. Your team does not need to be told their work matters. They know. What they need is for the organisation around them to know it too.
The full SSHRP survey findings are available at sshrp.netlify.app.
