CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research.

Title: Burned Out Buffers: How Work Redesign Alleviates Burnout Inequality Between Managers and Employees (with Duanyi Yang and Sunita Sah, Cornell University)

Abstract: Managers frequently experience higher burnout than the employees they supervise, yet organizational theory and interventions rarely address this inequality directly. We argue that this manager-employee burnout gap reflects a structural contradiction: managers are assigned responsibility for absorbing organizational strain and implementing change while simultaneously being deprived of the resources required to do so. Drawing on a relational extension of job demands-resources theory, we propose that top-down work redesign alone is insufficient to reduce this manager-employee burnout gap because it presumes managerial capacity without ensuring it. We hypothesize that pairing work redesign with self-resourcing interventions that replenish managers' energetic, emotional, and self-regulatory resources enables managers to implement structural changes that would otherwise stall or displace demands. We test these propositions in a field experiment across 75 U.S. veterinary clinics. Results confirm a substantial baseline burnout gap. Work redesign alone does not reduce this gap. However, combining top-down work redesign with self-resourcing significantly narrows it without increasing employee burnout. Mediation analysis supports the proposed mechanism: reductions in job demands, an environmental factor addressable only through enacted work redesign, occur exclusively in the combined condition. These findings advance theory on burnout inequality by identifying organizational role structure as a distinct axis of stratification and demonstrate that structural interventions require complementary investment in the capacity of those charged with implementing them.