(From Gallup) -- China will become the global economic leader sometime in the next 10 to 25 years, according to many economists. This means China—and not the United States—will have the largest GDP in the world, which will, of course, be a global game changer. She who has the gold makes the geopolitical rules.

But China faces some serious challenges on its road to dominance. Some obvious ones:

• enormous environmental problems that will require billions of dollars to fix

• the one-child rule, which will create a scenario of far too few workers supporting far too many retirees

• the growing likelihood of a disastrous banking bubble, where the balance sheets of businesses and banks are increasingly inflated and supporting one another

• economic uncertainty, if China's GDP -- which has been increasing at about 8% -- begins to grow at a decreasing rate

• fast-rising factory wages, which may cause China to lose its huge competitive advantage over other countries that may offer labor at a lower cost

• growing political and social instability, manifested in increasing demonstrations and protests throughout the country

To this list of well-known woes and concerns, let me add one more, and it's perhaps the most serious of all: low workforce engagement.

I know that sounds soft. But human beings spend at least one-third of their lives at work. And because of this, I could argue that a person's quality of life is driven by his or her life at work. And the working citizens of China are doing horribly; 6% of the people who work for an organization report being engaged at their jobs. In addition, about 26% are flat-out miserable -- what Gallup researchers call actively disengaged. To put that into perspective, the U.S. workforce is about 30% engaged and about 20% actively disengaged.

China, we have a workplace problem.

Command-and-control management doesn't work anymore

If you were to ask me what the most dangerous state of mind in China is right now, I'd say that it's active disengagement in the workplace because it's so widespread. The cause of disengagement in China is the same as it is in every workplace around the world: The workers despise their immediate boss. And the reason they hate their boss is because the wrong person was hired to be the boss. It's that simple.

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