Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Having a good relationship with your work is crucial, and yet our jobs are often a source of burnout and exhaustion. A toxic work environment will typically cause burnout. That's Eric Quintain, an organizational behavior researcher based in Melbourne.
He draws on lessons learned from a widespread research project across industries that looks into the hidden traps that exist in our jobs. Now, what you need to realize is that these traps are not easy to identify. You can see that you have a bad boss. You can see that you have difficult co-workers. But it's not easy to identify if you are part of those traps.
In this talk, he shares what he's learned, how we can break free to better connect, collaborate, and care for ourselves in the workplace.
Chapter 2: What are the hidden relational traps that lead to burnout?
We'll dive into this talk right after a break. This podcast is brought to you by WISE, the app for international people using money around the globe. With WISE, you can send, spend, and receive in over 40 currencies with no markups or hidden fees.
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And as my students very well know, it means that I study people in organizations. Now, I study them with a very specific perspective. I focus on their relationships. I focus on networks, the pattern of relationships people build with each other inside organizations. And when we do that, we have a different image of organizations that start to appear in front of our eyes.
So let me give you an example. This is an organization I've studied, people represented by circles, and their colors represent departments that they belong to. Now, when we apply this network perspective to this organization, we start to see another image of the organization that appears. We start to see some things that were not visible at first, and they become obvious.
For example, these departments are much more interconnected than what we thought before. Or this purple department feels like it's almost completely disconnected from the organization.
Now, the network perspective gives us many more tools, mathematical, statistical tools, to understand precisely the position of individuals in organizations and how those positions, the network that surrounds them, actually affect how they think.
And this has been related in the world of organizations to many important outcomes, like their performance, their creativity, their ability to be promoted, or whether they're going to leave the organization. And over the last 30 years, we've accumulated a vast body of empirical evidence showing that these networks matter.
And they matter across cultural contexts, they matter across industries, across types of organizations. And we've learned that there are two typical network structures that particularly matter, and I'll tell you a little bit more about them. Meet Kelly. Kelly is in what we call a cohesive network structure.
That means Kelly has strong relationship with her colleagues, but also all of her colleagues know each other. They trust each other, they talk with each other frequently. And now, without knowing anything else about Kelly or her colleagues, we can actually know a few things about her. We'll know that she can rely on support from her coworkers.
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Chapter 3: How do network structures impact workplace relationships?
And this is the example of domestic violence I was giving before. These norms can become so strong that when the interests of the person diverge substantially from the interests of the group, it becomes very difficult to break free and to escape from those norms. The second trap is called emotional contagion, or we call it emotional contagion.
And it's based on the research projects I'm conducting right now with one of my former PhD students. And we're studying communications and spread of emotions at the university. And what we find is that when people communicate frequently with each other, like in Kelly's cohesive structure, well, they also share emotions. They share how they feel.
And when they feel good, then everything's fine, no problem. But when they start complaining, they feel frustration, they start to have negative thoughts about the organizations, then the cohesive structure acts like an echo chamber. It amplifies those negative emotions, which generates tension, stress, it generates a fair amount of exhaustion and burnout. So the open structure is very different.
You don't have strong norms in an open structure. You don't have an echo chamber in an open structure, but it's still subject to a couple of those relational traps. The first one, we call it uncontrollable interdependencies. And it comes from a study we did with a former student in a hospital.
In that hospital, we identified that nurses who were exposed or who had to rely on very different people in order to deliver their job, to deliver their care, would actually experience higher level of burnouts.
That means when they need to coordinate between the doctors, the radiologists, the legal experts, the administrative people, they will depend on so many people to deliver the care to the patients that they ended up having no control about the quality of their work or when they could do their work. And this led them to experience inordinate amount of stress, which led to burnout.
The last trap, we call it excessive demands. And the idea is that here it's not that they depend on other people, but that many people depend on Alex. And if there are many people who depend on Alex in these open structures, that means they come from different perspectives, different departments, they have different requirements.
And this increases the workload on Alex so much that it can become excessive. And we have a paper we just published based on a research project where we demonstrate that individuals who are placed in these positions where they are receiving those demands from disconnected individuals, disconnected coworkers, are significantly more likely to experience burnout.
Now, what you need to realize is that these traps are not easy to identify. You can see that you have a bad boss. You can see that you have difficult co-workers. But it's not easy to identify if you are part of those traps. It can feel comfortable to be in Kelly's position, surrounded by close colleagues.
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