“We’re too busy.” When a manager hears that from their team, they usually think of too much work. So a task gets dropped, a temp is brought in or a project is pushed back a month. And still the complaint remains. That is because work stress often has a different cause from the number of hours. Research shows that unclear expectations and conflicting demands weigh at least as heavily, and those are things leaders can change themselves.
Three kinds of stress
Gargi Sawhney, Mallory McCord and colleagues reviewed sixty years of research on work stress: 515 studies covering almost 788,000 employees (Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2026). They distinguish three sources of stress in a role:
- Ambiguity: you don’t really know what is expected of you.
- Conflicting demands: one person asks for A, another for B, and both are in a hurry.
- Overload: there is simply more to do than there is time for.
Each has different effects. Ambiguity does the most damage across the board, including to work engagement. Conflicting demands are most strongly linked to burnout symptoms and plans to leave. Because people keep performing in the meantime, it doesn’t show up in the output figures. Overload mainly leads to negative emotions and physical complaints (HBR, September 2026). Treat all work stress as workload, and you often end up solving the wrong problem.
When the manager is the source
Alyson Meister and Nele Dael of the IMD business school asked 94 professionals to describe a moment when they felt overwhelmed. Almost nine in ten had experienced it in the previous month. More than half named their own manager as a source, either alone or together with conditions at work (Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 2025). Capable people in particular hide it: they stay calm and keep working, until they can’t any more (HBR, December 2025).
Changing while keeping the shop open
Ronald Warmerdam of IMPACT on the Job recently saw this at a board with big ambitions. The organisation had to change, and at the same time the day-to-day work had to carry on. New projects were added that had to fit in around the regular work. Some employees were happy with that and threw themselves into it. But at some point they got stuck. They asked for clear agreements: which work can I leave for now, what can I share out among colleagues, and which priorities aren’t really priorities at all? Every to-do list has things on it that we thought we needed and that, on reflection, can go.
According to Ronald, a lot depends on what happens when an employee takes that question to their manager. If the manager says, “I hear you and I understand, let’s look together at what we’re actually trying to achieve”, trust grows. If the manager says, “I hear you, but it still has to be done”, something goes wrong: in the trust between them, and in how the work is judged.
What counts as too much?
That conversation isn’t always easy for a manager either. The work has to get done, and what is too much for one person is perfectly manageable for another. Workload is about more than hours. You can feel swamped when new processes, training and experiments are added on top of the regular work. Or when something is going on at home that leaves you with less in the tank at work for a while. The employee, the manager and the organisation often see that limit differently. That is why it helps to look at it together, instead of negotiating over it.
Three questions for your next team meeting
The researchers give simple advice: ask three questions in your one-to-ones and short pulse surveys. You’ll then know which kind of stress is at play and what you can do about it.
- Do you know what is expected of you? If the answer is no, less work won’t help. What helps is clarity about goals, roles and who decides what.
- Are you getting demands that clash? Then the solution often lies with the board or management team: making the call and aligning priorities with each other, instead of passing the conflict down to the shop floor. Also read erratic policy stands in the way of work engagement.
- Do you have enough time and resources? Only here is it really about the amount of work. Go through the task list together and drop whatever doesn’t serve the purpose.
For more practical tips on reducing work stress, see reducing work stress: 4 effective tips.
Start with leadership
Clear expectations, making the call and really listening to an employee who is stuck: all of this is manager behaviour. With the Responsible Leadership Scale (VLS) from Leiders.nl, you can see how employees experience the leadership in their team. If you want to know how much energy there is in your teams and where it is leaking away, the Employee Engagement Survey (MBO) shows that per team.
