Definition
What is Occupational Friction™?
Occupational Friction™ is the resistance that opposes productive work and dissipates human energy when the behavioural demands of a work environment are not aligned with an individual’s natural personality preferences.
As Occupational Friction increases, more human energy is consumed adapting behaviour and less remains available for productive work. The idea rests on one simple observation: human energy is finite.
Every working day, people invest mental, emotional and physical energy in their roles. Some of it goes towards productive work: solving problems, serving customers, creating value. Not all of it does. Some is consumed simply by the effort of behaving in ways that do not come naturally. A naturally cautious person can learn to decide quickly. A naturally independent person can learn to collaborate. People are remarkably adaptable — the question was never whether they can perform these behaviours, but how much energy it costs them to sustain it.
This distinction is fundamental. Occupational Friction is not a measure of competence, intelligence, motivation or potential. It is a measure of resistance. Like physical friction, it consumes energy that could otherwise be used for productive work, leaving less available for thinking clearly, exercising judgement and delivering consistently high performance.
The result is not simply lower productivity. Over time, organisations feel the broader effects through heavier management effort, inconsistent performance, lower engagement, higher stress, poorer retention and rising recruitment costs — a systems-level explanation for problems usually treated as separate.
Fourth principle
Occupational Friction can be reduced.
The objective is not to change personality. Personality preferences are remarkably stable throughout adult life and should not be viewed as problems requiring correction. For example, if you do not have a natural preference for detail today, you will never develop one. Does this mean you cannot produce accurate, detailed work? Of course not — many people produce exceptionally detailed work every day. The difference is that it requires more energy.
Someone whose natural preference is for the bigger picture will always find sustained attention to detail more demanding than someone for whom detail comes naturally. Given the choice, they would generally prefer to focus on the broader objective and leave the finer detail to someone else.
Occupational Friction is not about what people can or can’t do. It is about what comes naturally, and the amount of energy required to sustain behaviours that do not. Rather than attempting to change personality, Occupational Friction is reduced by improving the alignment between the individual, the work, the manager, the team and the wider work environment.
Small improvements in alignment can produce disproportionately large improvements in organisational performance, because they allow more human energy to be directed towards productive work rather than behavioural adaptation. Every practical application of Occupational Friction™, from job architecture and recruitment to onboarding, management and leadership, is simply a different way of applying these first principles.
Why it can’t be observed directly
Occupational Friction cannot be observed directly.
Like physical friction, it is inferred from its effects. No engineer can look at two moving surfaces and see friction itself. Instead, friction is identified by what it produces: energy is lost, heat is generated, motion slows, components wear out, efficiency falls.
The same principle applies within organisations. No manager can look at an employee and directly observe Occupational Friction. Instead, they observe its consequences. An employee who once appeared enthusiastic gradually becomes disengaged. A capable individual begins making mistakes. Simple decisions take longer. Managers spend increasing amounts of time coaching, supervising and resolving issues. Stress levels rise, team relationships deteriorate, absence increases, staff leave, and recruitment begins again.
These are often treated as separate organisational problems, each requiring its own solution. Occupational Friction suggests something different: they may simply be different symptoms of the same underlying cause.
Most organisations measure outcomes. They measure productivity, engagement, retention, recruitment costs, absence and customer satisfaction. Very few attempt to measure the underlying resistance that influences every one of these outcomes. This is rather like measuring the fuel consumption of a vehicle without considering the friction acting upon it — the results can be observed, but the cause remains hidden.
Reducing Occupational Friction does not eliminate every organisational challenge. However, it removes one of the largest and least recognised sources of wasted human energy within modern organisations.
A key distinction
Behaviour is not personality type.
One of the greatest misunderstandings in management is the assumption that behaviour reveals personality type. It does not. Behaviour is what people do. Personality type influences which behaviours come naturally and which require sustained effort.
People are capable of behaving in ways that differ significantly from their natural personality preferences. They do it every day. A naturally quiet person can become an effective public speaker. Someone who prefers harmony can manage difficult conversations. A person whose natural preference is for the bigger picture can produce highly detailed work. None of these behaviours are impossible. The question is not whether they can be performed, but how much energy is required to sustain them.
Two individuals may produce identical results while experiencing very different levels of Occupational Friction. One performs the work naturally and with relatively little effort. The other achieves exactly the same outcome through continual behavioural adaptation. To an observer, both appear equally capable. The difference lies beneath the surface: one finishes the day with energy remaining, the other finishes the day mentally and emotionally depleted.
Occupational Friction separates performance from energy expenditure. Traditional management measures outcomes. Occupational Friction asks an additional question: how much human energy was required to achieve those outcomes? That question changes how organisations think about recruitment, management, leadership and retention. The objective is no longer simply to achieve performance — it is to achieve sustainable performance by reducing the unnecessary energy required to produce it.
What causes it
What causes Occupational Friction?
Occupational Friction occurs whenever the behavioural demands of a role differ significantly from an individual’s natural preferences as determined by their personality type. Every job requires behaviour. Some roles require meticulous attention to detail, others require rapid decision-making. Some demand continual social interaction, others require long periods of independent concentration. None of these behavioural requirements are inherently good or bad. The problem arises when they become a poor fit for the individual performing them.
Consider two employees working in exactly the same role. One naturally enjoys analysing data, following procedures and working with precision. The other naturally prefers variety, rapid change and the bigger picture. Both may complete the work successfully, but they are unlikely to experience the work in the same way. For one, the role feels natural. For the other, every day requires continual behavioural adaptation, and that adaptation consumes energy.
Occupational Friction can arise from many different sources, including:
- Work that continually requires behaviours outside an individual’s natural personality preferences.
- Managers whose management style conflicts with the personality types within their team.
- Team dynamics that reward behaviours that do not come naturally to every member.
- Organisational cultures that expect everyone to think and behave in similar ways.
- Recruitment decisions based primarily on skills and experience while overlooking behavioural fit.
- Promotions that reward past performance without considering the behavioural demands of the new role.
- Processes and systems that force people to work in ways that conflict with their natural preferences.
None of these factors automatically create Occupational Friction. The critical issue is alignment. The same work environment that energises one personality type may steadily exhaust another, which is why there is no universally perfect job, manager or organisational culture — only environments that create more or less Occupational Friction for different personality types.
This changes the question organisations should ask. Instead of “How can we change this person?”, the more useful question is “What is creating unnecessary Occupational Friction?” That shift in thinking often reveals opportunities to improve productivity, engagement and retention without changing the individual at all.
How it shows up
The manifestation of Occupational Friction.
Occupational Friction cannot usually be observed directly. Like physical friction, it reveals itself through its manifestations. At first these may be subtle: an employee who once appeared enthusiastic begins to lose motivation, another becomes mentally exhausted by the end of each day, someone who was previously engaged becomes increasingly detached from their work. Managers may notice that some individuals require continual supervision while others seem to flourish with very little support.
Over time, these individual manifestations begin to affect teams. Communication becomes more difficult, collaboration declines, misunderstandings become more frequent, and conflict becomes harder to resolve. The team expends increasing amounts of energy simply maintaining effective working relationships.
Eventually, Occupational Friction begins to manifest itself at an organisational level: productivity falls, absence increases, staff turnover rises, recruitment costs escalate, managers become overwhelmed, customer satisfaction declines, growth slows.
These manifestations are often treated as separate organisational problems, each requiring its own solution. Occupational Friction suggests something different: they are frequently different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon. This changes the questions organisations should ask — instead of asking why productivity is falling, why employees are disengaged, why turnover is increasing, why recruitment costs are rising, or why managers are spending so much time resolving people issues, Occupational Friction encourages a more fundamental question:
What is the source of the Occupational Friction being created?
By identifying and reducing Occupational Friction, organisations do not simply address individual symptoms. They address the underlying source of many of those symptoms simultaneously.
Measurement
Measuring Occupational Friction.
Occupational Friction cannot be measured directly. Like physical friction, it must be inferred. Engineers estimate friction by measuring its effects on a system, and organisations can adopt the same approach.
The first step is to understand the behavioural demands of the work. Every role places different behavioural demands on the individual performing it — some require sustained attention to detail, some require continual social interaction, some demand rapid decision-making, others require patience, routine or careful analysis. These behavioural demands can be identified and described.
The second step is to understand the individual’s natural personality preferences. Every personality type brings its own strengths, preferred ways of working and behavioural tendencies. None is inherently better than another. The critical question is not whether the individual is capable of performing the work, but how closely the behavioural demands of the role align with their natural preferences. The greater the alignment, the lower the Occupational Friction. The greater the misalignment, the more human energy is likely to be consumed through continual behavioural adaptation.
This principle extends beyond recruitment. Occupational Friction can be estimated wherever there is an interaction between people and work: between an employee and their role, between a manager and a team, between colleagues working together, between leaders and organisational culture.
Once organisations begin measuring Occupational Friction, they gain something they have rarely possessed before: a practical way of identifying hidden sources of wasted human energy before they become visible as declining performance, disengagement, stress or staff turnover. Measurement does not eliminate Occupational Friction. It makes it visible. Once visible, it can be reduced.
What can be done
Reducing Occupational Friction.
Occupational Friction is not inevitable. Like physical friction, it can rarely be eliminated entirely, but it can almost always be reduced. The objective is not to create perfect alignment. It is to remove unnecessary resistance so that more human energy is available for productive work.
Reducing Occupational Friction begins with understanding where it is being created. This requires organisations to look beyond observable behaviour and examine the behavioural demands being placed upon people every day. Once those demands are understood, there are many ways Occupational Friction can be reduced: jobs can be redesigned to make better use of people’s natural preferences, managers can adapt their style to suit different personality types, teams can be structured to create complementary strengths rather than unnecessary conflict, recruitment decisions can place greater emphasis on behavioural fit alongside skills and experience, new employees can be onboarded in ways that work with rather than against their natural preferences, and leadership teams can better understand how their collective personality influences culture and decision-making.
Importantly, reducing Occupational Friction does not require everyone to do only what they naturally enjoy. Every role contains tasks that require behavioural adaptation, and every individual occasionally needs to work outside their natural preferences. Occupational Friction becomes a problem only when that adaptation is continual, unnecessary or excessive. The goal is not perfection. It is optimisation.
Organisations often invest heavily in skills, technology, processes and management training. All of these have value. However, if Occupational Friction remains high, a significant proportion of that investment is continually offset by the hidden loss of human energy. Reducing Occupational Friction does not replace these investments — it increases the return on every one of them.
Why it matters
Why Occupational Friction matters.
For decades, organisations have invested heavily in improving performance: recruitment, leadership development, employee engagement, organisational culture, management training, technology and business processes. Many of these investments produce measurable improvements, yet the same organisational problems continue to appear. Productivity remains below expectations, managers spend increasing amounts of time dealing with people issues, staff turnover remains stubbornly high, recruitment costs continue to rise, and employees experience increasing levels of stress and disengagement.
These challenges are typically treated as separate organisational problems requiring separate solutions. Recruitment teams focus on hiring better people. HR teams focus on engagement and wellbeing. Leadership programmes attempt to improve management capability. Each initiative may deliver value in isolation, yet many organisations continue to experience the same underlying problems because they are addressing the manifestations rather than the source.
Occupational Friction proposes a different way of understanding these issues. Instead of asking how to improve productivity, increase engagement, reduce staff turnover or lower recruitment costs, a more fundamental question becomes possible: where is unnecessary Occupational Friction being created? Once organisations begin examining work through this lens, many long-standing people problems become easier to understand, because they are no longer viewed as isolated events but as different expressions of the same underlying cause.
Occupational Friction is therefore more than a theory of personality type. It provides a common language that connects recruitment, leadership, management, teamwork, organisational culture, employee wellbeing and staff retention into a single, coherent model centred on the efficient use of human energy.
In practice
Occupational Friction and recruitment.
Every recruitment decision is ultimately a decision about Occupational Friction. Most recruitment processes focus on whether a candidate has the knowledge, skills and experience required to perform the role. These are clearly important, but they answer only one question: can this person do the job? Occupational Friction introduces a second, equally important question: how naturally will this person be able to do the job every day?
Two candidates may possess identical qualifications and experience, yet experience the same role very differently. One may find the behavioural demands closely aligned with their natural preferences. The other may perform equally well but only through continual behavioural adaptation. Traditional recruitment rarely considers this hidden energy cost, assuming that if someone demonstrates the required behaviours during selection, they will sustain those behaviours indefinitely. In reality, observable behaviour tells us what a candidate can do — it tells us very little about how naturally they can continue doing it over months and years.
This helps explain why organisations are often surprised when apparently excellent recruits become disengaged, underperform or leave within the first year. In many cases the individual has not changed; the behavioural demands of the role simply require a level of continual adaptation that proves unsustainable over time.
Viewing recruitment through the lens of Occupational Friction shifts the objective from selecting people who can perform the role to selecting people who are naturally equipped to thrive within it — with real implications for recruitment costs, employee engagement, management time and long-term performance.
In practice
Occupational Friction and staff retention.
Staff retention is ultimately a measure of how sustainable Occupational Friction is over time. Organisations often assume that employees leave because of poor pay, poor managers or better opportunities elsewhere. While these factors undoubtedly influence individual decisions, they do not explain why some people remain engaged and committed in exactly the same environment while others choose to leave.
Every employee continually expends human energy adapting to the behavioural demands of their work. When those demands are broadly aligned with natural personality preferences, the energy required to adapt remains relatively low. When the demands continually conflict with those preferences, the energy required simply to perform the role increases day after day. This gradual depletion rarely happens overnight — it develops over weeks, months and sometimes years, often masked from colleagues and managers until the cumulative cost becomes apparent: motivation declines, engagement reduces, stress increases, and the individual begins to consider opportunities that require less continual behavioural adaptation.
From this perspective, resignation is often the final manifestation of Occupational Friction rather than its cause. Instead of relying solely on pay reviews, engagement surveys or benefits, organisations can begin by asking a more fundamental question: where is unnecessary Occupational Friction being created, and how can it be reduced?
Improving staff retention is therefore not simply about persuading people to stay. It is about creating an environment in which they no longer feel the need to leave.
In practice
Occupational Friction and leadership and management.
All managers have one job: to achieve results through other people. Most approaches to management focus on improving performance through better communication, clearer objectives, stronger processes, coaching, motivation or accountability. Each of these has value, but Occupational Friction suggests they address only part of the problem. Before any management technique can be effective, the behavioural demands being placed upon individuals must be sustainable.
Every manager creates a working environment. Through the priorities they set, the behaviours they encourage and the standards they expect, they determine how much behavioural adaptation is required from the people around them. When those expectations are broadly aligned with the natural preferences of the team, Occupational Friction remains low and human energy is directed towards productive work.
When Occupational Friction is high, managers often find themselves working harder simply to maintain performance — introducing additional meetings, tighter controls and greater supervision. These interventions may produce short-term improvements, but unless the underlying source of Occupational Friction is addressed, they rarely remain effective.
Leadership and management are therefore not simply about directing, motivating or controlling people. They are about creating an environment in which individuals can consistently perform at their best with the least unnecessary Occupational Friction.
In practice
Occupational Friction and team performance.
A team’s performance depends not only on the ability of its individual members, but on how effectively those individuals work together. Every team loses productive energy through misunderstanding, duplicated effort, poor communication and people working against their natural strengths. The greater this unnecessary Occupational Friction, the less of the team’s collective energy is available to achieve its objectives.
This principle was demonstrated in research carried out with the Waikato Institute of Technology (WINTEC) in New Zealand. Professor Prashant Kumar, who taught Cyber Security, faced a recurring problem: entire teams occasionally failed a substantial team project, causing capable students to fail the course despite demonstrating the required technical knowledge.
Rather than attempting to improve the students’ technical ability, the research focused on reducing Occupational Friction within the teams themselves. Each student completed a PeopleMaps personality profile and received a simple explanation of their natural team function. Armed with this knowledge, teams allocated responsibilities according to natural strengths and preferences instead of assigning roles arbitrarily. Pass rates increased, and subsequent controlled research reinforced the findings: teams that understood the natural team functions of their members consistently outperformed teams that did not, even when the latter contained stronger individual students. Professor Kumar later presented these findings at an industry conference in the United States.
The lesson is straightforward. Organisations do not maximise performance by simply recruiting better individuals. They maximise performance by enabling those individuals to work together in ways that minimise unnecessary Occupational Friction, allowing more of the team’s collective energy to be invested in achieving exceptional results.
In practice
Occupational Friction and organisational culture.
Organisational culture determines where Occupational Friction is created and where it is reduced. Culture is often described in terms of values, mission statements or behavioural frameworks. Occupational Friction suggests it is better understood by examining the behavioural demands that employees experience every day: the true culture of an organisation is revealed not by what it says it values, but by the behaviours it consistently expects, rewards and tolerates.
When those behavioural demands are broadly aligned with the natural preferences of the people who work there, Occupational Friction remains relatively low. Communication becomes easier, collaboration improves, and more human energy is directed towards productive work. The opposite is equally true: conflicting priorities, inconsistent management, unclear decision-making, excessive bureaucracy or unrealistic expectations all increase the amount of behavioural adaptation required simply to function within the organisation.
Creating a high-performing culture is not about encouraging everyone to think or behave in the same way — diversity of personality, perspective and approach is one of the greatest strengths an organisation can possess. The objective is to create an environment in which those differences complement one another instead of creating unnecessary Occupational Friction.
In practice
Occupational Friction and an organisation’s productivity.
An organisation’s productivity depends upon how efficiently it converts human energy into productive work. Occupational Friction provides a simple explanation for why productivity differs so dramatically between organisations with similar people, resources and opportunities: the greater the unnecessary Occupational Friction experienced by employees, the more human energy is consumed simply coping with the behavioural demands of work, rather than converted into productive output.
One of the clearest examples of Occupational Friction damaging productivity is staff turnover. Productivity is affected long before the individual walks out of the door — managers spend time dealing with the situation, colleagues absorb additional responsibilities, and the organisation begins the costly process of replacing the individual. Once a replacement arrives, further time and energy are invested in recruitment, onboarding, training and supervision before the new employee reaches full effectiveness. If that individual leaves prematurely, the entire cycle begins again.
Increasing productivity is therefore about more than asking people to work harder or introducing better systems. It is about reducing the unnecessary resistance that prevents human energy from being converted into productive work. The organisations that achieve the highest levels of sustainable productivity are not necessarily those with the most talented employees or the largest budgets — they are the organisations that waste the least human energy.
In practice
Occupational Friction and organisational growth.
Growth is almost always constrained by people before it is constrained by opportunity. As headcount increases, so do the behavioural demands placed upon the organisation: more people must be recruited, integrated into teams, managed effectively and retained. Unless unnecessary Occupational Friction is continually reduced, each new employee adds complexity faster than they add productive capacity.
This is particularly evident in organisations experiencing poor staff retention. Many continue investing heavily in recruitment, yet their headcount barely changes — new employees replace those who have recently left, leaving the organisation trapped in a continual cycle of recruitment, onboarding and replacement. From the outside, these organisations appear to have a recruitment problem. In reality, they have an Occupational Friction problem: they are not recruiting to grow, they are recruiting simply to maintain their existing workforce.
The organisations that achieve sustained growth are not simply those that recruit the fastest. They are those that minimise unnecessary Occupational Friction as they scale, enabling every new recruit to make a lasting contribution to the organisation’s productive capacity.
Conclusion
Occupational Friction™ was first proposed by Martin Gibbons in 2026.
It is a management framework explaining how organisations lose productive human energy when the behavioural demands of work are not aligned with individuals’ natural personality preferences.
Occupational Friction™ provides a new way of understanding organisations. Rather than viewing recruitment, leadership, management, teamwork, organisational culture, staff retention and productivity as separate disciplines, it explains them as different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon: the unnecessary dissipation of human energy.
Reducing Occupational Friction is not about lowering standards or allowing people to work only in ways they find comfortable. Every worthwhile role requires challenge, learning and adaptation. The objective is to remove unnecessary resistance so that people can invest more of their energy in achieving meaningful outcomes rather than simply coping with the environment in which they work.
Human energy is one of the few resources that every organisation possesses but no organisation can afford to waste. The organisations that thrive in the future will not necessarily be those that demand the most from their people. They will be those that waste the least.