New Survey Shows 75% of Employees Like Their Boss: What the Data Reveals vs. The Stereotype

The data is in: A new survey, Boss’s Day Bombshell: 75% of Employees Actually LIKE Their Boss – New Survey Shatters Stereotypes, reports that 75.9% of employees like their boss. This figure, released just in time for the annual corporate ritual of National Boss’s Day, is being presented as a welcome rebuttal to the tired trope of the tyrannical manager. It suggests a modern workplace built on mutual respect and positive team culture.

But when a number runs so contrary to the prevailing narrative—and more importantly, to other, harder data points—my first instinct is to question the metric itself. This isn't just professional skepticism; it's a necessary diagnostic. Because while three-quarters of employees may report "liking" their manager, U.S. employee engagement is simultaneously scraping a 10-year low, and nearly half of all managers report feeling burned out.

These two realities cannot peacefully coexist. One of them is a vanity metric. The other is a warning signal. My analysis suggests the 75.9% figure isn't a sign of a healthy workplace; it's a symptom of a flawed measurement that obscures a much deeper problem.

The Likability Illusion

Let’s first examine the headline number. A survey from GroupTogether, conducted with 1,260 U.S. respondents, found that a supermajority of employees hold positive feelings for their managers. The top reasons cited were "they create a great team culture" (27.7%) and simply "they’re a nice person" (22.9%). On the surface, this is positive.

But the methodology here warrants scrutiny. I've looked at hundreds of these corporate sentiment surveys, and the framing of the question is everything. A binary "like/dislike" question is profoundly different from asking if an employee feels developed, trusted, or inspired by their manager. "Liking" is a vague, low-bar metric. You can almost picture the scene: an employee gets the survey notification, glances over their shoulder at their manager's office, and clicks the path of least resistance. This isn't just speculation. A separate HR Dive report found that 47% of workers feel pressured to not fully disclose their honest opinions in engagement surveys.

When nearly half your sample admits to self-censoring, any positive sentiment data must be heavily discounted. The 75.9% figure is likely inflated by social desirability bias—the tendency to give answers that will be viewed favorably by others. But what does "like" even mean in a professional context where power dynamics are always in play? Is it a measure of genuine affinity, or simply an absence of overt conflict? The data doesn't tell us.

This is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling. The survey is being positioned as proof that the "clichéd stereotype of people hating their boss is outdated." Yet, it fails to reconcile its findings with the far more robust data from institutions like Gallup, which paints a grim picture of the American workplace. It’s like celebrating a ship’s pristine paint job while ignoring the fact that it's taking on water.

The Manager as a Single Point of Failure

The real story isn't found in a simple likability poll, but in the immense, and frankly unsustainable, pressure placed on the modern manager. According to Gallup's long-running research, roughly 70% of a team’s engagement is determined by the quality of its manager. That is an astonishing concentration of influence. The manager is the primary conduit for corporate culture, strategy, and morale. They have become the modern workplace's load-bearing wall, tasked with holding up the entire structure.

And that wall is showing critical signs of stress.

While employees may report "liking" their bosses, engagement among managers themselves has plummeted. One report found that only 47% of managers feel fully engaged, with a staggering 46% admitting they would give up their title just to feel more engaged at work. They are caught in a squeeze: responsible for the well-being and productivity of their teams while receiving inadequate training (57% lack extensive engagement training) and facing immense pressure from above.

This creates a dangerous paradox. We have a system where disengaged managers are tasked with engaging their teams, and their success is measured by shallow metrics like "likability." It’s a feedback loop of burnout. If 70% of a team's success hinges on a single person, and that person is running on empty, is that a leadership problem or a fundamental design flaw in our corporate structures?

The market, as always, has a clear-eyed answer. The corporate world isn't responding by fundamentally re-engineering the role of the manager. Instead, it's buying a technological crutch. The Human Capital Management (HCM) software market is projected to grow about 10% annually—to be more exact, the forecast is for a compound annual growth rate of 9.8%—to reach nearly $58 billion by 2029. The real tell is the investment in AI, where analysts forecast 45% annual growth for AI-powered HR tools.

Companies like Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY), ADP (NASDAQ: ADP), and Paychex are seeing steady investor confidence. (Workday, for instance, trades around $235 with analysts targeting ~$288, a potential 23% upside). Their products promise to automate the drudgery of management—AI recruiting agents that cut screening time by 57%, bots that handle scheduling, and platforms that streamline performance reviews. The goal isn't necessarily to make managers better leaders in a human sense, but to make their crushing administrative burden more manageable. It’s a tacit admission that the job, as currently constructed, is too much for one person to handle.

This Metric is a Red Herring

The 75.9% likability figure is a dangerous distraction. It provides a comforting, headline-friendly number that allows organizations to sidestep the systemic crisis of burnout and disengagement affecting both managers and their teams. "Liking" your boss is not a meaningful Key Performance Indicator. Trust, psychological safety, career development, and genuine engagement are. These are the metrics that correlate with retention, innovation, and long-term value creation. The market's heavy investment in HR tech confirms the real diagnosis: the human architecture of management is failing, and companies are betting billions that software can patch the cracks. The real story isn't that we like our bosses; it's that the job of being a boss has become structurally unsustainable.