Science1 publisherNot yet confirmed elsewhere2 min readPublished
Bielefeld surveys tie both rises and drops in pointless work to higher exhaustion
Bielefeld University researchers found that both rises and drops in illegitimate tasks went with more emotional exhaustion than a steady level of them. The authors call the result surprising and offer uncertainty about future expectations as one possible explanation.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The team surveyed employees repeatedly across two studies, once a day in one and once a week in the other, to follow how changes in work related to how people felt.
- Illegitimate tasks are duties employees see as unnecessary or unreasonable, for example because the work does not fit their actual role.
- The university stresses that the result is no argument for organisations to keep burdensome tasks in place.
- Bormann's team sits in Bielefeld's institute for family businesses, firms it singles out because roles there often grow up over years through informal arrangements.
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Why it matters
- cost Removing pointless duties appears to bring a short-run strain of its own, borne by the staff whose work is being reshaped while the change is under way.
- decision Managers trimming tasks now have to decide how to announce the cut; the authors' one practical recommendation is to explain changes clearly and let employees ask questions.
- constraint Task changes often arrive alongside a reorganisation or a new manager, and survey associations of this kind cannot separate the change in duties from the event that caused it.
The researchers compared both kinds of change with the same reference point: a steady level of illegitimate tasks [1]. Against that baseline, employees whose pointless work shrank showed higher emotional exhaustion, and so did those whose pointless work grew [1]. Bielefeld's own account calls the finding surprising [10].
The pattern only showed up because the same employees were measured again and again. "This makes visible an aspect of workload that can easily be overlooked in a one-time survey," Kai C. Bormann, a professor at Bielefeld and a co-author of the study, said [4]. A single snapshot records how many pointless tasks a person has on that day. Someone halfway through a reshuffle would look the same as a colleague with a steady load of that size.
The paper's title lists uncertainty next to exhaustion as an outcome [7], so the team appears to have measured it directly. The university's summary still calls it "one possible explanation": when tasks change, it becomes less clear what will be expected of employees later [12].
The summary does not report how many employees took part, where they worked, or how large the differences in exhaustion were [11]. Without those figures, nobody can tell whether a cut costs staff a hard week or a hard quarter. The thing this doesn't tell you is how long the extra strain lasts. Surveys run daily or weekly [3] are built to catch short-run swings. Showing whether exhaustion after a reduction later falls below its old level would take a longer study.
Both sides of the association come from the employees' own answers. An illegitimate task is defined by how the employee perceives it [2], and exhaustion was tracked through the same repeated surveys [3]. An employee who is already exhausted may also be quicker to notice that their duties have moved. Ruling out that reverse path would take a lagged analysis, and the summary describes the results only as associations [1].
What to watch
- The full Work & Stress paper's participant numbers and effect sizes, and whether a decrease or an increase in illegitimate tasks carried the larger association with exhaustion.
- A longer follow-up showing whether exhaustion after a reduction in pointless tasks eventually falls below the stable-load baseline once new roles settle.
- The Bielefeld team's separate project on how introverted and extraverted leaders respond to uncertainty at work.