Can the Future of Work Nourish Brilliance?
Katja Ujčič, psychologist, MBA, MA, PhD student in psychology
Organisations value intelligence, creativity, and the ability to solve complex problems. Yet recognising these qualities does not necessarily mean creating conditions in which they can develop. A person can be highly capable, employed, and productive while remaining intellectually underchallenged, feeling misunderstood and professionally constrained.
This is the paradox of giftedness at work: gifted individuals may have substantial capacity to contribute meaningfully to the company, yet they do not always have adequate opportunities to develop their abilities or support their overall well-being.
A study among members of Mensa Slovenia brings this gap into focus. Career-development support was strongly associated with job satisfaction, while a supportive work environment was closely associated with participants’ perceptions that they could develop and use their giftedness (Ujčič, 2026). These findings support a practical argument: recognising intellectual ability should lead to a closer examination of the opportunities, relationships, and working conditions surrounding it.
High ability needs room to grow
Gifted adults are not a uniform group. High intelligence alone does not establish a person’s emotional profile, interpersonal needs, professional ambitions, or mental-health status. Neither exceptional achievement nor psychological distress should be presumed from a giftedness label.
Gagné’s (2004) Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent helps explain why ability and achievement should be distinguished. The model describes talent development as the transformation of natural abilities into systematically developed skills, with the environment among the influences on that process. Applied to work, it invites a useful question: what enables an employee’s abilities to become expertise and make meaningful contributions?
The Mensa Foundation report by Cross and colleagues (2024) illustrates the diversity of needs among highly intelligent people. Its final survey dataset included 3,443 participants, and ten Mensa members were interviewed. The study covered academic, career-development, social-emotional, and mental-health needs. Approximately one quarter of respondents were classified in a low-needs profile, half in a moderate-needs profile, and one quarter in a high-needs profile. Greater unmet need was associated with lower flourishing, a measure of psychological well-being.
What the Slovenian study reveals
The Slovenian research reports a sample of 70 Mensa Slovenia members who took part in a voluntary online survey. The survey included demographic questions and four established instruments: the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), which assesses five personality traits; the eight-item Flourishing Scale, which measures psychological well-being; the Four Domains Needs Questionnaire, developed by the William & Mary Institute for Gifted Education, which examines educational, career-development, social-emotional, and mental-health needs; and Spector’s 36-item Job Satisfaction Survey, which covers nine aspects of working life. The cross-sectional design combined an adapted needs questionnaire with measures of personality and well-being, and job satisfaction, alongside assessments of the work environment and the perceived development and use of giftedness. Open-ended questions provided additional accounts of participants’ experiences (Ujčič, 2026). The study examines relationships among self-reported experiences. It does not measure objective productivity, establish organisational performance, or show that these relationships are unique to gifted people.
Main findings
Gifted adults are often characterized by intensity, sensitivity, inner complexity, strong needs for meaning, and a drive for authenticity, which can make rigid or poorly matched workplaces especially frustrating. The study does not treat gifted adults as a psychologically fragile group. Instead, it shows that their satisfaction and growth depend heavily on whether the organization provides autonomy, intellectual challenge, mentorship, psychological safety, and meaningful development opportunities
The strongest quantitative result was that career-development support was the clearest predictor of job satisfaction: the better the perceived support for career growth, the higher the reported satisfaction at work.
A supportive organizational environment was also a strong predictor of the perceived use of giftedness, showing that environment is not just background context but a key condition for realizing talent.
By contrast, social-emotional support and mental-health support were not statistically significant direct predictors of job satisfaction in the quantitative analysis, although the open-ended responses showed that many participants still experienced loneliness, misunderstanding, stigma, anxiety, depression, and limited access to appropriate psychological support.
Career support stands out
Career-development support showed a strong positive association with job satisfaction (Pearson’s r = .627, p < .001). Participants who reported greater support for their career development tended to report greater satisfaction at work (Ujčič, 2026).
This finding is relevant because participants also described limited development opportunities, recognition, and support. Career development can mean more than promotion. It may involve deepening expertise, moving into a role that better matches a person’s abilities, learning across disciplines, or receiving guidance about a professional direction. These are practical responses worth exploring.
The study cannot establish that improving career support will cause greater job satisfaction. Nevertheless, the strength of the association makes career development a clear priority for further investigation and organisational attention.
Purpose also matters
A sense of meaning and purpose in life was also associated with greater job satisfaction, although the relationship was modest (Spearman’s ρ = .261, p = .031). In a regression model including meaning in life and social-emotional support, meaning in life was a statistically significant positive predictor of job satisfaction (β = .441, p = .003): participants with a stronger sense of meaning tended to report greater job satisfaction. Together, the two variables explained 18.2% of the variation in job satisfaction, although social-emotional support did not make a statistically significant additional contribution. This finding concerns purpose in life broadly, rather than meaning derived specifically from work (Ujčič, 2026). It suggests a connection worth exploring, but it does not show that employers can increase job satisfaction simply by making work feel more purposeful.
Ability needs an enabling workplace
Participants who perceived their work environment as more supportive also reported greater development and use of their giftedness. A simple regression model explained 46.8% of the variation in the reported development-and-use score (R² = .468, p < .001; Ujčič, 2026).
The practical question remains important: do employees have the support and opportunities to develop their abilities and put them to use? Employers could examine access to challenging work, freedom in how tasks are approached, specialist mentoring, and routes for proposing improvements.
Support still matters
The social-emotional domain and the mental-health-related domain both showed weak positive associations with job satisfaction. Neither reached the conventional threshold for statistical significance (Pearson’s r = .239, p = .051, and Spearman’s ρ = .238, p = .053, respectively; Ujčič, 2026). Participants’ open-ended responses add context. They described feeling misunderstood, struggling to find people they could relate to, and encountering support that did not adequately recognise their experiences. These accounts do not establish a statistical relationship with job satisfaction, but they identify concerns that deserve attention in their own right.
Ryan and Deci’s (2000) self-determination theory offers a broader perspective by identifying autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs. As a theoretical lens, it encourages attention to both opportunities for capable action and the quality of human connection. Career development and psychological support can therefore be considered together rather than treated as competing priorities (Van den Broeck, 2016).
Mensa Foundation vs. Mensa Slovenia
The Mensa Foundation report and the Slovenian thesis address related questions from different perspectives. The former maps unmet needs in relation to broader well-being; the latter examines workplace experiences in a smaller national sample. Their findings can inform one another, but the Slovenian study is not a direct replication or a statistical comparison between populations.
It would be premature to conclude that Slovenian gifted adults are less distressed, that job satisfaction is independent of psychological support, or that organisational conditions matter more than personal needs in general. The more specific contribution is to highlight career development and the perceived use of ability within a wider discussion of well-being.
Several limitations matter. Participants were Mensa members who volunteered to take part, so the findings may not apply to all gifted employees. There was no comparison group outside Mensa, and participants were surveyed only once, preventing conclusions about changes over time or cause and effect. Self-report measures may also share sources of bias.
The adapted needs questionnaire and its scoring require further validation, including how some response categories are treated as missing data. The number of usable responses varied between analyses. These findings provide a starting point for further research rather than a universal profile of gifted employees.
From recognizing giftedness to managing it well
Recognizing giftedness at work requires more than acknowledging high ability. It means understanding how an individual thinks, feels, learns, relates to others, and finds purpose in work, then adapting management practices accordingly. Gifted employees may perceive and process information differently, so standard approaches can overlook their needs for intellectual complexity, autonomy, deeper learning, and meaningful contribution.
Employers can begin with individual conversations and turn them into practical commitments: mentoring, more challenging responsibilities, opportunities to build specialist expertise, or greater freedom in how work is carried out. Development opportunities should also remain accessible to employees with relevant abilities and needs who have not been formally identified as gifted, but could be gifted and experiencing overexcitabilities.
The social environment deserves equal attention. Managers can encourage questions, explain decisions, respond constructively to disagreement, and provide access to confidential support. Understanding individual differences and expecting respectful behavior go hand in hand.
Gifted employees can help make career conversations more useful by describing the conditions under which they work effectively: the challenges they seek, the expertise they want to develop, the autonomy they need, and the relationships that support their progress. This gives both the individual and the organization a clearer basis for action.
The value of recognizing giftedness lies in what follows. Organizations need a coherent strategy that connects career development, appropriate challenge, autonomy, and psychological support with employees’ individual needs. The Slovenian study points to career support and a supportive environment as promising areas for attention. The next step is to turn that understanding into practical opportunities, then assess whether those opportunities help people develop and contribute.
Organisations that value high ability need a deliberate strategy to recognise, develop, and support gifted employees. The workplace of the future must create space for brilliance—intellectually, psychologically, and professionally—so that exceptional potential can flourish.
For guidance on developing a strategy for gifted employees in your organization, contact info@katjaujcic.com.
References
Cross, J. R., Cross, T. L., & Mishra, A. (2024). A study of unmet needs among highly intelligent individuals [Research report]. William & Mary Center for Gifted Education and Mensa Foundation. https://www.mensafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Research-Report-2Mensa-Foundation-Study-of-Unmet-Needs.pdf
Gagné, F. (2004). Transforming gifts into talents: The DMGT as a developmental theory. High Ability Studies, 15(2), 119–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359813042000314682
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Ujčič, K. (2026). Paradoks nadarjenih umov: Vpliv delovnega okolja na karierni razvoj, socialno-čustveno podporo, duševno zdravje in zadovoljstvo pri delu nadarjenih zaposlenih [The paradox of gifted minds: The impact of the work environment on the career development, social-emotional support, mental health, and job satisfaction of gifted employees]. Master’s thesis, DOBA Fakulteta, Maribor.
Van den Broeck, A., Ferris, D.L., Chang, C.-H., & Rosen, C.C. (2016). A Review of Self-Determination Theory’s Basic Psychological Needs at Work. Journal of Management. DOI: 10.1177/0149206316632058