New Enneagram Research Reveals Why Half Your Team Wants More Structure and the Other Half Wants Less

A great deal of management writing over the last two decades has nudged organizations toward flatter structures and self-managed teams, with the promise that greater individual discretion over how work gets done leads to greater engagement and performance. 

That research is sound as far as it goes. But not every employee likes working without a defined hierarchy. 

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review study of more than 5,500 US financial services companies found that workforce composition shifts measurably within a year of a de-layering event. Researchers found that employees who were comfortable operating without close oversight stayed on at a higher rate, while employees who wanted more defined rules and reporting lines left voluntarily. The researchers also ran subsample tests controlling for company performance, so the attrition wasn’t just an artifact of struggling companies losing people generally.

Autonomy, in other words, is not a universal good that lifts every employee equally. Some prefer to work with close managerial direction and chains of command and will disengage or leave when those protections disappear. 

The Enneagram Predicts Exactly Who Ends Up on Each Side

For managers building an engagement strategy or a change management plan, knowing that autonomy motivates some employees and repels others is only half the picture. You also need to know which employees fall into which camp. Turnover data, if it reveals the pattern at all, only tells you that after the fact.

Personality data is the missing link. If people sort into preferences for autonomy versus structure, as the research shows, then the question becomes what is doing the sorting. The Enneagram is the system of choice here. Unlike other personality frameworks which focus on  how people behave, the Enneagram focuses primarily on the why—the core motivations, hidden fears and deep desires driving human behavior. This tells us a lot about an individual’s relationship to structure and freedom, which makes it a natural framework for testing where the security-vs-autonomy tension falls.

Truity's Enneagram at Work research put that to the test. We asked more than 64,000 employees open-ended questions about their highs and lows at work, and then asked a separate sample of more than 23,000 respondents to rate 18 distinct workplace values, from “Autonomy” and “Security” to “Advancement,” “Collaboration” and “Innovation.” Those responses were mapped to their Enneagram type. 

Of the 18 values measured, Security and Autonomy produced the sharpest divide between types: 

• Types Six and Nine stand well above the rest on the value of Security. A full 35% of Type 6s (The Skeptic) ranked Security as their top priority, the highest of any type in the study. Type 9s (The Peacemaker) followed close behind at 29%. Neither type ranked Autonomy in their top values at all.
• Autonomy has the greatest impact for Types Eight and Five. 37% of Type 5s (The Investigator) and Type 8s (The Challenger) ranked Autonomy as their main priority, their own highest-ranked value of the 18 measured. Only 16% of Eights ranked Security in their values list. This represents a nearly 20-point gap between the types who need Security most and those who barely register it as a value at all.

The Personality Science Behind the Numbers

As job-related work values, Security and Autonomy sit on opposite ends of the same question: what conditions does a person need before they feel able to do their best work? 

At one end, people who lean toward Security need predictability and risk mitigation. They view consistent routines, linear progression paths, transparent leadership and clear processes as their primary safety net. Vague directives and inconsistent feedback feels like they've been set up to fail.

People who lean toward Autonomy are the opposite—they view rigid structures and constant oversight as a trap. Their core drivers are self-determination, privacy and freedom from control, and they believe their fate is safest when managed by their own hands.

When we look at these values through the lens of the Enneagran, that need for predictability or that resistance to control traces back to a specific core fear and desire.

Security-seeking personalities

Type Six 

Type Six fears being without guidance or left unprotected; a core “sore spot” is chronic self-doubt and the fear of being left without a safety net. They feel safest when they are guided through life and will seek out predictable environments and reliable alliances to make sure that happens. In Truity's sentiment analysis, dissatisfied Sixes reacted negatively to “incompetent” leadership, summed up starkly in one response: “I feel unstable and like I have no support or motivation.”

A few things trigger a Six’s sore spot and they clearly show why Security is so important to this type.  They include: 

• Sudden change: Unexpected disruptions to plans, routines or structures, like an IT failure bringing operations to a standstill or a new boss arriving with a brand-new set of rules. 
• Broken trust: Signs of betrayal, inconsistency or dishonesty from bosses and colleagues.
• Ambiguity: Vague instructions, unclear expectations, unpredictable authority figures.
• Isolation: Situations where they must make major decisions completely alone. 

Type 9 

Type Nines are driven by a core fear of conflict and separation and their "sore spot" is feeling overlooked or unimportant, Nines cope with these fears by merging with the people or environment around them, prioritizing harmony over their own needs until that harmony itself becomes exhausting. Dissatisfied Nines often mask their frustration behind an agreeable exterior which makes them the hardest type to read when they are struggling. In Truity's analysis, Nines said that “incompetent,” “depressing” and “fake” environments upset them greatly, a sentiment which is summed up in this response: “Overwhelmed and stressed—it kind of makes me hate people sometimes.”

As with Sixes, a lack of job-related Security can trigger a Nine's sore spot in various ways:

• Conflict without a process to defuse it: Too much autonomy can strip away the buffer that normally keeps the peace between colleagues. When there's no structure to fall back on, Nines may get pushed into direct confrontation.
• Pressure to perform: Nines feel secure inside a steady working rhythm. When employees are handed open-ended demands and free rein to steer their own course, they may start pushing for urgency and competing for visibility, and Nines are left to either get drawn into that competition or fade into the background. 
• Feeling unseen: Nines avoid pushing their own opinions forward to preserve harmony. Without a clear structure like a defined role or a set path for progression to do that work for them, their contributions go unacknowledged. 

Autonomy-seeking personalities

Type Eight

Type Eights fear being controlled or made vulnerable to others. Their “sore spot” is powerlessness, and Eights protect against it by asserting control, competence and self-reliance wherever they can. In Truity's sentiment analysis, dissatisfied Challengers used words like “micromanagement,” “incompetence” and “unfair” to describe environments and management styles that tried to control them. When asked about the cause of their disillusionment, one Eight identified their “Great sense of frustration with inefficiencies and bureaucracy and lack of execution.”

Several actions block the Eight’s need for control and independence:

• Micromanagement: Bosses or peers check on their work too often and try to dictate how Eights must do their tasks.
• Bureaucracy: Rules and processes that slow down decisions and action.
• Hidden agendas: Unfairness or inconsistency applied by people who hold power over them, including people making decisions behind their backs or not sharing the whole truth.
• Inefficiency they can’t fix: Slow systems or red tape that wastes their time are incredibly frustrating to Eights who would rather cut through the problem directly than sit through a process built to manage it. 

Type Five

Type Fives fear being incapable, overwhelmed or depleted by the demands of others. Their “sore spot” is a scarcity of internal resources, energy, competence and even privacy, which drives them to withdraw from people and tasks that drain their reserves. Fives protect their independence fiercely. As one Five told us: “The people, the conflicts, the politics, they exhaust me.”

Since Fives feel triggered when people invade their private focus, it makes sense that they will seek as much Autonomy as possible. They are likely to struggle in the following environments:

• Rigid oversight: Structures that dictate exactly how and when work gets done, leaving no room for independent thought.
• Intrusions and unnecessary meetings: Being pulled into discussions or check-ins that drain the time and energy they need to think deeply.
• Forced collaboration: Being expected to engage socially or perform enthusiasm on someone else's schedule.
• Bureaucracy: Rules and processes that exist for their own sake and waste scarce mental resources.

Other freedom-seeking types

Two further types score highly on Autonomy in our research: Type 4 (The Individualist) and Type 7 (The Enthusiast), although for different reasons. 

Fours want to live authentically and express a distinctive identity, and self-directed work environments give them the room to work in a way that feels personally meaningful. Fours feel triggered when employers force them to conform or treat them like an replaceable cog in a machine. 

Sevens, on the other hand, want to experience life fully and avoid feeling trapped, bored or in pain. They seek out Autonomy because it gives them room to change course and switch to another task or project when inspiration strikes, or try something new when a better option opens up. Fixed hierarchies and structures close down the variety they're naturally scanning for, and that feels like the walls closing in.

Clear Expectations Isn't the Same as Security

There is one more nuance in the data that’s worth calling out: wanting structure and wanting security are not the same need, even though they can look identical from the outside.

Type 1s (The Perfectionist) prioritize “Clear Expectations” as their primary work value, for example. On the face of it, you might assume that Ones fall into the Security-seeking bucket, but Ones are not chasing Security the way that Sixes are. Their motivation is integrity and quality—Ones want to do what’s right and deliver the best possible work product. Clear expectations matter to them because they help define what "good" and “doing it right” looks like, and if you take away the standard, a One may feel completely unmoored.

This is a useful distinction for anyone leading a change program. Two people can both push back on a new team structure or process, but for completely different reasons. A Six may need reassurance that the plan is stable and the leadership behind it is trustworthy. A One may need a clearly defined standard for what success looks like under the new structure. 

Offer only one of these and you may solve half the resistance on your team while leaving the other half unaddressed.

Resources and Next Steps For Managers

If you're managing change, small or large, whether it’s a simple return-to-office rollout or an organization-wide restructuring, you doubtless will be prepared for some resistance. No policy will land the same way across a team built from nine different motivational systems, and trying to design one that does is a losing exercise.

What the Enneagram adds is a way to anticipate where that resistance will come from, and why. This is information worth having, because the sooner you know whether an employee is reacting to a loss of Security or a loss of Autonomy, the sooner you can tailor how you communicate the change and reduce potential friction. 

If you want to map this across your own team, Truity@Work's personality testing platform makes it simple to run the Enneagram assessment across a group. Each person's results are delivered as a comprehensive Enneagram for the Workplace report, giving you and your team a practical starting point for the conversations that need to happen around your change story. Explore Truity@Work’s testing platform. 

This article is the third piece in a series built on our Enneagram@Work research. Our first piece, The Engagement Gap: New Enneagram Research Reveals Why Your Best Incentives Are Only Reaching Half the Team covers our methodology and core findings, and The Ambition Myth: New Enneagram Research Reveals That Not Everyone Wants the Corner Office looks at the data through the lens of career advancement. 

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