A 60-Year Study of 800,000 Workers Just Found the Number 1 Cause of Burnout—Here’s What to Do About It
Six takeaways:
A recent study pooled six decades of research covering nearly 800,000 workers. Its conclusion: role ambiguity— a lack of clarity regarding what’s expected of you— is the single biggest driver of poor performance, stress, burnout, and intent to quit.
The study weighed three classic stressors against each other: having too much to do, balancing competing demands, and role ambiguity. Ambiguity won, and it wasn’t close. It did more damage to performance, stress, burnout, and intent to quit than either of the others.
Why? Because people don’t wait for clarity. When they don’t know what success looks like, which decisions are theirs, or how their work ladders up to anything larger, it saps at mental energy and drive that is needed for problem-solving, creative thinking, and initiative.
On trend, contemporary workforce members surveyed showed that three key forces are making the problem of role ambiguity worse right now:
- Return-to-Office Mandates: With the pandemic in the rearview, many organizations are pulling people back to the office without articulating why. Who needs to return, and for what, when the work got done remotely. Employees have viewed mandated office returns as somewhat arbitrary and unrelated to actual job performance.
- AI Disruption: Organizations are deploying AI tools faster than they’re redefining the roles around them. AI takes over specific tasks well before anyone updates a job description. People end up doing hybrid human-AI work with no clear sense of which tasks are still theirs, how the job will change, or whether it survives in its current form.
- Layoffs that Quietly Expand Roles: When companies cut staff, role definitions rarely get updated for those who remain on the team. Surviving employees absorb the responsibilities of former colleagues with little or no formal change to their title, no revisitation of their scope of work, no discussion of adjusted compensation, often taking on the equivalent of multiple jobs while being told it’s still one.
The antidote to role ambiguity is a manager who clearly takes pains to bring clarity to their employees’ work experience. The piece provides three strategies managers can employ here:
- Define success concretely: Ask your team, what will we point to in six months and say that’s what we were aiming for? If the answer is vague, the ambiguity is real. Gallup finds only 47% of U.S. employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work. This number that should worry every workplace leader.
- Clarify decision rights: People often know what they’re supposed to do but not which calls are theirs versus which need approval. Naming that explicitly removes the cognitive overhead of re-litigating every decision.
- Give people a way to prioritize: Ambiguity spikes during transitions. The teams that weather it best have an understood method for ranking urgent against important— so when something shifts, nobody has to stop and wait for direction.
Maybe this advice helps you as a supervisor of others; maybe you are an employee who will come away from this piece with a better understanding of your workplace dissatisfaction. Either way, we hope this knowledge and set of strategies helps you restore drive and efficiency in your place of work.
By Soren Kaplan for Inc.
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