Nearly everyone loves a surprise on their birthday, but at work? No so much – and recent research from Colorado State University’s College of Business finds that unexpected changes to daily workload on the job are linked to anxiety and burnout.
In “‘I Didn’t See That Coming!’ A Daily Investigation of the Effects of As-Expected and Un-Expected Workload Levels,” the Department of Management’s Sherry Fu and her coauthors examined how office workers respond when their expectations for a day’s work differ from their actual assigned responsibilities. They found that intrusions into workers’ expected schedules can be a source of anxiety that stems from a loss of control over their environment.
They discovered that how much work an employee expects to need to manage in a day will frame how they respond to their workload: Workers who expected and experience a busy day reported less anxiety than those who were surprised by the amount of work they needed to perform that day. Unsurprisingly, those who managed a heavier-than-expected workload reported more stress, but those who reported having less work than expected also felt stressed.
“If I was expecting a meeting today, and it got rescheduled for next week, I might have something already planned for that may cause anxiety for me,” Fu said. “I may think, ‘Next week all these things are going to change, and I may have less control over my schedule next week than I hoped.’”
“‘I Didn’t See That Coming!’ A Daily Investigation of the Effects of As-Expected and Un-Expected Workload Levels”
Sherry Fu, Young Lee1, Seoin Yoon2, Nikos Dimotakis3, Joel Koopman4, Bennet Tepper5
Personnel Psychology
1 Florida State University
2 Arizona State University
3 Oklahoma State University
4 Texas A&M University
5 Ohio State University
Even more consequentially, Fu and her coauthors found that these anxieties don’t evaporate at the end of the workday and indirectly caused additional anxiety the following day. These lingering anxieties may interfere with workers’ ability to unwind after work and recharge for the next day. This ongoing stress can be a precursor to burnout, according to researchers.
Daily surveys for rich insight
To generate the insight about employees’ attitudes toward their workloads, researchers surveyed groups of workers at a Southern university in email three times daily for the course of three weeks. These surveys asked employees to use a five-point scale to rate their levels of expected workload each morning and actual workload before heading home as well as their levels of anxiety and emotional exhaustion.
These surveys generated nearly 2,000 data points that connected the link between unexpected workloads and increased anxiety. It was an intriguing find, but Fu and her colleagues wanted deeper insight into the causes and drew on a pair of psychological theories, the transactional stress model and expectations theory, to build a hypothesis that the feeling of reduced control over their environment drove anxiety.
That meant they needed additional data. The researchers developed a second three-week, thrice-daily survey presented to workers at the university as well as their working spouses. This round of surveys again used a five-point scale to ask participants to rate anxiety and emotional exhaustion. The second surveys also included several questions to gauge the degree of subjects’ work withdrawal the previous day, gathering information about time spent on personal matters, if they thought about being absent and if they exerted less effort than expected.
This generated more than 1,500 day-level data points. When combined with the first survey’s data, it offered a deep look into how individual workers’ reflection and internal dialogue about their workload impacts their productivity
“We were interested in studying within-person effects, which were not comparing between persons, but within individuals,” Fu said. “Some people always have higher expectations or they always have misaligned, but for other people, it might be occurring less often.”
These highly personal measures of workload and wellbeing also provided the insights that the implications of volatile and unpredictable workloads don’t merely drain workers that day: They’re cumulative and interfere with workers’ ability to recharge between shifts, which can be a precursor to burnout.
A deeper level of management research
For the practice of management in the workplace, Fu and her coauthors’ research provides managers with perspective on providing individuals with more control of their day-to-day workload in an effort to head off burnout and turnover. “I Didn’t See That Coming!” is also on the frontiers of organizational management research, as it helps lead academics as they begin to drill past organizational structures and team dynamics to focus on workers’ interior experiences on the job.
“We’re just taking a level down from looking at teams to say, ‘You know, there’s a lower level, and that’s individuals. Let’s take a look at their trajectories. Let’s look at how each individual may have differences there,” Fu said.
CSU’s College of Business is building a community of action-oriented leaders focused on using Business for a Better World through its leading-edge research, accessible education and top-rated undergraduate and graduate programs. Connecting the principles of people, planet, profit, and purpose across organizational business goals has earned the College global recognition, including being named one of five Best Business Schools in the world for responsible business education by Financial Times.
