When Your Team Lose Motivation — and Why It Can Be a Symptom of Startup Success

In the early days of a startup, team motivation feels almost effortless. It emerges naturally. People are close to the founder, decisions move quickly and in plain sight, and everyone can see how their efforts directly shape the business.

As the business scales, many founders notice something unsettling. Some of the very people who helped build the company from the ground up appear less energised. They no longer take ownership in the same way. Accountability starts to feel harder to maintain.

For founders, this can be confusing and frustrating. These are the people who built this with you. It can feel as though commitment has dropped off or ambition has softened.

The reality is more uncomfortable—and more hopeful. This motivational breakdown is often a direct consequence of success as the business scales.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, provides a useful lens for understanding why early team members lose motivation—and what founders can do to rebuild it.

The motivational shift that scaling creates

SDT distinguishes between autonomous motivation—doing work because it feels meaningful, chosen, and aligned with one’s values—and controlled motivation, where behaviour is driven by pressure, evaluation, or obligation.

In early-stage startups, work often feels deeply meaningful. Proximity to founders, shared struggle, and belief in a disruptive mission naturally support autonomous motivation. As the business scales, however, structure and process begin to replace founder connection. Work can start to feel more constrained and evaluative, shifting motivation from intrinsic to controlled.

Decades of research show that autonomous motivation is associated with stronger performance, greater persistence, higher creativity, and better psychological well-being. These effects are particularly pronounced in uncertain and complex environments—exactly the conditions most startups face as they scale.

According to SDT, motivation depends on leaders supporting three psychological needs:

• Autonomy — feeling a genuine sense of choice and ownership

• Competence — feeling effective, capable, and able to grow

• Relatedness — feeling connected, trusted, and valued

Early-stage startups tend to support these needs almost by default. Growth, however, can unintentionally disrupt them.

Why employees disengage as the company grows

For team members, scaling often means a loss of proximity to the founder. Founders no longer seek perspectives and ideas as they once did. Decisions that once happened in conversation now happen in closed-door meetings. Context becomes filtered. Direction feels more abstract. Autonomy quietly erodes as structure and approval layers appear, and informal authority is replaced by hierarchy, process and role definitions.

Competence is also challenged. Early employees were often hired for adaptability, initiative, and breadth rather than depth in narrowly defined roles. As the organisation professionalises, expectations change. Delivery pressures increase with growth. Mistakes become more common. New leaders arrive with different expertise and ways of working. Early employees can feel that the rules of the game have shifted—without being explicitly supported to adapt.

Relatedness often suffers most. As founders become busier and more removed, early team members can experience a subtle but powerful sense of disconnection. They no longer feel “in it together.” Without realising it, founders may replace relational closeness with communication volume—more updates, more all-hands, more dashboards—while the emotional bond weakens.

When autonomy narrows, competence feels threatened, and connection weakens, motivation shifts from autonomous to controlled. People comply rather than commit. They protect their position rather than invest discretionary energy. Attention can move towards self-protection, risk management, and navigating emerging internal politics.

This is not disengagement by choice. It is a human response to a changing environment.

Reframing scaling as a motivational opportunity

Founders who sustain motivation as the business scales do something fundamentally different. They stop assuming motivation is a given and instead design the conditions in which motivation can continue to emerge.

Crucially, they recognise that scaling is not just a structural transition—it is a psychological one. Early employees are not only being asked to change how they work; they are being asked to let go of an identity that once made them feel successful. Without space to acknowledge what is ending, leaders inadvertently ask people to move forward while still anchored to the past.

Effective founders help their teams make sense of this transition. They name what is changing. They legitimise the discomfort. They create the conditions for people to re-author their role in a larger, more complex system.

Restore autonomy through clarity, not control

As businesses grow, ambiguity often increases before the system stabilises. Founders can counter this by being explicit about decision rights, ownership boundaries, and where autonomy genuinely sits.

Autonomy does not mean doing whatever you want. It means knowing where you can act without permission—and trusting people to do so.

Many founders are understandably reluctant to relinquish decision-making as the business scales. At the same time, they are less accessible. Without deliberate design, this creates friction and slows what was once an agile system.

Founder forums, in particular, need to become spaces to explore ideas together, encourage innovation, and engage from a team perspective—not simply venues for sharing updates on decisions already made elsewhere.

Support competence transitions, not just performance

Scaling can change what “good” looks like. Early employees often need help letting go of old success patterns and developing new capabilities. What brought us to this point might not be right for the next phase of business growth.

In the early days, stretch assignments and expanded responsibility were part of daily life. As structure and process increase, work can become more formulaic. Founders need to ask how they can intentionally recreate stretch experiences that push people beyond their comfort zone and support continued growth.

This requires leaders to normalise learning curves, explicitly name how roles are evolving, and reward development—not just outcomes. A helpful question is: What does this role require now that it didn’t twelve months ago, and how clearly have we named that shift?

Without this support, people are often judged against expectations they were never invited to update.

Rebuild relatedness intentionally

At scale, connection no longer happens organically. Founders who sustain motivation remain visible in fewer but more meaningful ways. They share context, not just conclusions. They acknowledge change rather than pretending nothing has shifted. They make space to talk openly about what is ending and what is beginning as the culture evolves.

A practical signal of relatedness is whether early team members still feel able to influence direction, not just execute against it.

A founder’s role in sustaining motivation at scale

The central shift for founders is this: motivation at scale is no longer a by-product of proximity and adrenaline. It is a leadership responsibility.

Self-Determination Theory reminds us that people do not lose motivation because they become complacent. They lose it when autonomy narrows, competence feels threatened, and connection weakens.

In early-stage startups, motivation is fuelled by shared struggle and immediacy. At scale, those conditions disappear. The founder’s role shifts from being the source of energy to being the architect of an environment in which motivation can survive growth.

Scaling a startup is not just a structural challenge. It is a psychological one, and founders who recognise this are far better placed to sustain both performance and commitment through the most demanding phase of growth.