Across organizations today, the narrative is consistent. Leaders and employees alike describe their days as being consumed by meetings, endless requests, and constant interruptions. The result is that the work which truly matters—strategic thinking, thoughtful decisions, meaningful responses—gets displaced to the evenings, when individuals are already depleted. Strategy, innovation, and reflection are pushed into hours that should be reserved for recovery. This is no longer an occasional reality. It has become the way many organizations function.
The theory of role overload, first articulated by Robert Kahn and colleagues in 1964, helps explain why this pattern is so damaging. Role overload occurs when the demands and expectations attached to a position exceed the time, energy, and resources of the individual who occupies it. The modern workplace, with its escalation of tasks, unrelenting pace, and constant information flow, has institutionalized this condition. It is not limited to executives. It affects people at every level of the organization, from front-line staff to senior leaders. The overload does not discriminate, though it often falls heaviest on those most capable of carrying it.
This is where competence itself becomes a burden. The most skilled and reliable individuals are repeatedly chosen to absorb the excess. Managers direct urgent projects, unfilled responsibilities, or team shortfalls towards them, confident that they will deliver. While others contribute at the minimum level, high performers are loaded with work equivalent to two or three people. Over time, this dynamic leads to exhaustion, erosion of resilience, and eventually burnout. Organizations burn out their strongest assets while leaving under-performance unaddressed. It creates a culture where doing more well is punished with more work, while doing less is quietly tolerated.
Neuroscience provides an additional lens on the consequences of overload. Korn Ferry’s research highlights what they call the “battles in the brain.” Under normal conditions, the cortex—the part responsible for reasoning and complex decision-making—functions in balance with the amygdala, which governs instinctive survival responses. Yet under constant bombardment of information, uncertainty, and fear, the amygdala can hijack the system. It overwhelms the thalamus, the brain’s relay station, and effectively silences the cortex. The result is that critical thinking and clear decision-making are replaced by reactive, fight-or-flight responses. In a world where the average person consumes 74 gigabytes of information per day—the equivalent of watching 16 movies—and processes nearly 100,000 words daily, the risk of amygdala hijack is ever-present. Organizations are operating in a landscape where 328.77 million terabytes of new information are created globally each day, far beyond what human brains evolved to handle.
Structural decisions reinforce this cycle of overload. Many organizations delay or avoid advertising for positions, either as a cost-saving measure or due to the belief that the gaps can be absorbed internally. Others struggle to recruit or develop the skills required to replace those who leave, resulting in the same core group being asked to carry the weight. In the short term, this may appear efficient. In reality, it extracts productivity by consuming the health and capacity of individuals. The effect is similar to drawing down on a bank account without replenishment: eventually, there is nothing left to withdraw.
Another layer to this dynamic lies in how organizations exploit the constraints of the labor market. In many contexts, older employees who are closer to retirement know that opportunities outside their current organization are limited. Similarly, in weaker economies, employees of all ages understand that finding another job is unlikely, or at best uncertain. In my opinion organizations are aware of this reality. When the system knows that people cannot easily leave, it can continue the cycle of overload unchecked. Employees are treated as though their reduced mobility is a license for the organization to extract more, even at the cost of health and dignity. The irony is sharp. The very people who carry deep competence, institutional knowledge, and loyalty are those most at risk of being overloaded. In practice, this means organizations are burning out the wisdom and experience they should be protecting, and they are doing so because they assume there will be little resistance.
The impact on individuals is severe. Continuous overload disrupts sleep, elevates stress, increases irritability, and narrows the ability to think creatively. Decision-making is compromised when fatigue and amygdala hijack set in. The quality of work declines, not because people are careless, but because they are exhausted. Over time, confidence erodes and engagement declines. What began as commitment to the organization can turn into quiet disengagement or complete withdrawal. For many, burnout becomes the inevitable outcome of being treated as an unlimited resource.
The organizational costs are equally significant. Overload undermines clarity and slows the pace of decision-making. Collaboration suffers as overextended employees withdraw from meaningful engagement. Innovation dries up when the cognitive bandwidth required for new ideas has already been consumed by survival. High performers eventually exit, leaving behind a vacuum that is difficult to fill. Those who remain may continue, but their contributions are diminished by exhaustion. The organization loses not only its best people but also the energy and culture that sustain long-term performance.
Fairness and sustainability converge here. It is neither fair to the individual nor sustainable for the organization to normalize overload as the operating system of work. To rely on the most competent people to carry the failures of recruitment, the absence of skills pipelines, or the tolerance of non-performance is to erode the very foundation on which success is built. The measure of leadership is not how much more can be extracted from the willing, but how effectively the system distributes responsibility and resources. Without that balance, organizations will continue to burn out those they most need to retain.
If people at every level can only do their real work at night, the issue does not lie with their capacity. It lies with the design of the system itself. The solution is not more grit from individuals. It is structural reform: re-balancing roles, addressing under-performance, investing in skills, and creating space for meaningful work during the day. Anything less simply perpetuates a cycle of overload that no individual can sustain indefinitely.