When Work Becomes Exhausting: Why Not All Job Demands Are the Same

If an employee is overwhelmed, should we reduce the amount of work—or change what makes the work difficult?

This is an important question for HR professionals, managers, and therapists trying to understand occupational distress. When someone becomes exhausted, it is tempting to assume that the problem is simply too much work. Sometimes it is. Sustained excessive workload is an important occupational stressor.

But workload alone does not tell us enough.

Two employees can have similarly demanding jobs and experience them very differently. And even the same employee can find a demanding project stimulating at one point and exhausting at another.

Consider two employees.

Employee A is managing a complex, high-stakes project. The work requires sustained effort, rapid learning, and considerable responsibility. At the same time, the employee has substantial autonomy, understands why the project matters, receives useful feedback, and has access to support. The work may therefore be highly engaging and provide opportunities for learning and accomplishment.

But that does not make it harmless. If the intensity continues for too long without sufficient recovery, the same employee can be highly engaged and increasingly exhausted.

Employee B is also working hard, but much of the effort goes into resolving conflicting instructions, navigating unnecessary procedures, searching for information, dealing with poorly designed systems, and trying to understand constantly changing priorities. Considerable energy is being spent, but much of it does not help the employee accomplish the work itself.

Both employees have demanding jobs. But understanding their situation requires more than counting hours or tasks.

We need to examine what is demanding about the work, what those demands enable or obstruct, and what resources employees have available to deal with them.

Why Workload Alone Is an Inadequate Diagnosis

The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model provides a useful framework for understanding this distinction (Bakker et al., 2023).

Job demands are aspects of work that require sustained physical, cognitive, or emotional effort and therefore carry psychological or physiological costs. They can include workload, time pressure, emotionally demanding interactions, complex decision-making, role conflict, or difficult working conditions.

Job resources, by contrast, are aspects of work that help employees accomplish their goals, reduce the costs associated with demands, or support learning and development. Examples include autonomy, social support, constructive feedback, role clarity, access to information, and opportunities for development (Bakker et al., 2023).

JD-R theory describes two important processes operating in working life.

High and persistent job demands can contribute to an energetic or health-impairment process, gradually depleting employees’ resources and increasing the risk of exhaustion and burnout.

Job resources contribute to a motivational process, supporting engagement, persistence, and effective performance.

Importantly, these processes can occur at the same time. Longitudinal evidence broadly supports the proposition that job demands predict burnout-related outcomes, while job resources predict motivational outcomes such as work engagement, although these relationships can also be reciprocal over time (Lesener et al., 2019).

An employee can therefore be deeply engaged in meaningful work while simultaneously becoming exhausted by its intensity.

This matters because engagement should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that a demanding workload is sustainable.

Challenge and Hindrance Demands: A Useful Distinction, but Not a Simple One

Another influential framework distinguishes between challenge demands and hindrance demands (LePine et al., 2005).

Challenge demands are demands that may provide opportunities for achievement, learning, mastery, or professional growth. Examples can include complex tasks, responsibility, demanding goals, and some forms of time pressure.

Hindrance demands are demands that tend to obstruct goal attainment or personal development. Common examples include unnecessary bureaucracy, role ambiguity, conflicting expectations, organizational politics, and poorly designed procedures.

At first glance, this distinction appears straightforward:

challenge = potentially motivating
hindrance = harmful.

But the research tells a more complicated story.

Meta-analytic research suggests that challenge demands can be positively associated with engagement while still being associated with strain and burnout. Hindrance demands, by contrast, tend to be associated with poorer motivational as well as health-related outcomes (Crawford et al., 2010; Mazzola & Disselhorst, 2019).

“Challenge” is not a synonym for “healthy demand.”

A difficult project may be exciting, meaningful, and professionally rewarding—and still become exhausting if the intensity is excessive or prolonged.

More recent theoretical work has also challenged the idea that demands can always be placed neatly into objective “challenge” and “hindrance” categories. Employees may appraise the same demand differently depending on the circumstances, and a single demand may contain both challenging and hindering elements (Podsakoff et al., 2023).

A tight deadline, for example, might feel like an energizing challenge when priorities are clear and resources are available, but like an obstacle or threat when the employee is already overloaded, lacks essential information, or depends on conflicting decisions from several stakeholders.

For HR and managers, this means that simply classifying workplace stressors as “good stress” and “bad stress” misses an important part of the picture.

Some Demands Consume Effort Without Helping People Do Their Work

The challenge–hindrance distinction becomes particularly useful when we look at the everyday obstacles that consume employees’ resources.

Consider role ambiguity.

An employee may spend considerable cognitive effort trying to determine:

What exactly am I responsible for?
Which task has priority?
Who has authority to make this decision?
What does my manager actually expect?
How will my performance be evaluated?

None of this effort necessarily advances the task itself.

The same can happen with role conflict. An employee may receive incompatible instructions from different stakeholders and spend substantial time negotiating which expectation to satisfy.

Administrative burden can function similarly. Poorly designed software, duplicated reporting requirements, unnecessary approval processes, or repeated meetings can require significant effort without contributing proportionately to meaningful goal attainment.

Interpersonal problems create another category of demands. Workplace incivility, bullying, conflict, and chronically difficult communication require employees to spend psychological resources managing social threat rather than accomplishing their work.

These demands matter because reducing them may improve working conditions without necessarily making the work itself less ambitious.

Sometimes the problem is not that employees have too much meaningful work.

The problem is that too much of their effort is being consumed by obstacles surrounding the work.

Why the Same Demand Can Affect Employees Differently

The relationship between demands and well-being is not determined by workload alone. Several factors can influence how demanding work affects an employee.

1. Appraisal

Employees interpret demands differently.

A complex assignment may be experienced as an opportunity to demonstrate competence, as an obstacle preventing success, as a threat to one’s position—or as some combination of all three.

These appraisals are influenced by previous experience, expectations, perceived control, available resources, and the broader organizational context. Contemporary developments of the challenge–hindrance framework therefore increasingly distinguish the characteristics of the demand itself from the employee’s appraisal of it (Podsakoff et al., 2023).

2. Job resources

Resources such as autonomy, social support, constructive feedback, role clarity, access to information, and opportunities for development are consistently associated with better employee well-being and engagement (Bakker et al., 2023; Lesener et al., 2019).

Some resources may also buffer the effects of particular demands under certain conditions.

But resources do not make excessive demands harmless.

A highly autonomous employee can still become exhausted by sustained overload. A supportive manager cannot compensate indefinitely for chronic understaffing. Meaningful work does not eliminate the need for recovery.

3. Person–job fit

Person–job fit provides another useful lens.

A task that requires skills an employee already possesses may be demanding but manageable. The same task may require enormous cognitive effort from someone who has not yet received sufficient training.

Values matter as well. Work that feels meaningful to one employee may feel disconnected from another employee’s professional priorities.

Person–job fit therefore helps explain some differences between employees, but it should not be used to explain away problematic working conditions. Individual differences do not transform unreasonable demands into reasonable ones.

4. Context

A demand rarely exists in isolation.

A deadline may be manageable during a relatively quiet month and overwhelming when combined with staff shortages, family responsibilities, repeated interruptions, or several competing deadlines.

This is why workplace demands should be understood as part of a system of demands and resources, rather than evaluated one by one.

What the Evidence Does Not Imply

The research on job demands is useful partly because of what it prevents us from concluding.

It does not mean that high workload is harmless

The fact that some demanding work can be motivating does not mean that organizations should ignore excessive workload.

Challenge demands still consume resources and can contribute to strain. Meta-analytic evidence indicates that challenge stressors should not simply be treated as benign or “good” stressors: they can be associated with psychological strain and adverse health outcomes even when they also have motivational benefits (Mazzola & Disselhorst, 2019).

It does not mean that employees simply need more resilience

Individual differences influence how people respond to work, but burnout cannot be adequately understood as an individual deficit.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed (World Health Organization, 2019).

When several employees are struggling with the same workload, processes, leadership practices, or organizational constraints, those conditions deserve investigation.

It does not mean that individual interventions are useless

Mindfulness, CBT-based programmes, stress-management interventions, coaching, and other individual approaches may help employees manage aspects of occupational distress.

But evidence that an intervention reduces symptoms does not demonstrate that it has corrected the working conditions contributing to those symptoms.

Helping an employee cope with an unhealthy work environment does not automatically make the work environment healthy.

It does not mean that job resources provide unlimited protection

Autonomy, support, feedback, and meaningful work matter.

But they should not become an excuse for excessive demands.

There is no evidence-based formula in which enough autonomy or purpose makes chronic overload psychologically cost-free.

What HR and Managers Should Investigate Before Intervening

When a team appears exhausted, the first question should not automatically be:

How can we make employees more resilient?

But neither should it automatically be:

How can we reduce everyone’s workload?

A better starting point is:

Where is employees’ effort actually going?

That question leads to a more useful diagnostic process.

Step 1: Identify the demands

Start with what employees are actually spending effort on.

Is the pressure coming from:

volume of work?
time pressure?
emotionally demanding interactions?
complex decision-making?
conflicting priorities?
role ambiguity?
administrative procedures?
interruptions?
interpersonal conflict?
inadequate staffing?
poorly designed technology?

“Too much work” is often a description of the experience rather than a diagnosis of its cause.

Step 2: Ask what each demand does

Does the demand contribute directly to meaningful goal attainment?

Does it provide an opportunity for learning or accomplishment?

Or does it mainly obstruct employees from doing their work?

A complex client problem and a duplicated reporting requirement may both consume an hour. Psychologically and organizationally, however, they are not equivalent.

Step 3: Ask how employees experience the demand

Do employees primarily experience it as:

challenging,
obstructive,
threatening,
or some combination of these?

Do not assume that management’s interpretation matches employees’ experience.

Step 4: Examine the available resources

For the most demanding parts of the job, ask:

Do employees have sufficient autonomy?
Are priorities clear?
Do they have the information they need?
Is managerial support available?
Are staffing and technical resources adequate?
Do employees have the necessary skills and training?
Is there sufficient opportunity for recovery?

The relevant question is not simply whether the organization offers “support,” but whether employees have the resources required for the demands they actually face.

Step 5: Change the work where possible

Different problems require different interventions.

If workload is genuinely excessive, reduce it or re-prioritize.

If employees are receiving conflicting instructions, clarify decision rights.

If administrative procedures consume disproportionate time, redesign them.

If employees lack competence for a new responsibility, provide training.

If constant interruptions are the problem, protect periods of focused work.

If several priorities cannot realistically be achieved simultaneously, managers need to make the trade-off explicit rather than leaving individual employees to absorb the conflict.

This last intervention is particularly important.

When an employee says, “I can’t do all of this,” a useful managerial response is not simply:

Try to prioritize.

It is:

“Given the capacity we have, which priorities are we going to change?”

Prioritization is ultimately a management decision, not an additional cognitive task that should automatically be transferred to an already overloaded employee.

The Bottom Line

Demanding work is not inherently harmful.

People can derive meaning, mastery, engagement, and professional growth from difficult work. Organizations do not create healthy workplaces simply by making every job easier.

But demanding work still has costs.

The goal is therefore not to eliminate challenge. It is to distinguish productive difficulty from unnecessary friction, prevent demands from becoming chronically excessive, and provide resources that genuinely help employees accomplish their work.

So when a team is exhausted, don’t ask only:

How much work do they have?

Ask:

What is consuming their effort—and how much of that effort is actually helping them do the work?

That question often points much more directly toward what needs to change.

References

Bakker, A. B., Demerouti, E., & Sanz-Vergel, A. (2023). Job Demands–Resources theory: Ten years later. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 25–53. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-053933

Crawford, E. R., LePine, J. A., & Rich, B. L. (2010). Linking job demands and resources to employee engagement and burnout: A theoretical extension and meta-analytic test. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 834–848. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019364

LePine, J. A., Podsakoff, N. P., & LePine, M. A. (2005). A meta-analytic test of the challenge stressor–hindrance stressor framework: An explanation for inconsistent relationships among stressors and performance. Academy of Management Journal, 48(5), 764–775. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2005.18803921

Lesener, T., Gusy, B., & Wolter, C. (2019). The Job Demands–Resources model: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal studies. Work & Stress, 33(1), 76–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/02678373.2018.1529065

Mazzola, J. J., & Disselhorst, R. (2019). Should we be “challenging” employees? A critical review and meta-analysis of the challenge–hindrance model of stress. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 40(8), 949–961. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2412

Podsakoff, N. P., Freiburger, K. J., Podsakoff, P. M., & Rosen, C. C. (2023). Laying the foundation for the challenge–hindrance stressor framework 2.0. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 165–199. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-080422-052147

World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. World Health Organization.