4 relationship traps that lead to burnout | Eric Quintane

You're listening to Ted Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas. Conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Having a good relationship with your work is crucial and yet our jobs are often of burnout and exhaustion. A toxic work environment will typically cause burnout. That's Eric Quintaine, an organizational behavior researcher based in Melbourne. He draws on lessons learned from a widespread research. Now what you need to realize

These traps are not easy to identify. You can see that you have a bad You can see that you have difficult coworkers. In this talk, he shares what he's learned. to better connect, collaborate, and care for ourselves in the workplace. We'll dive into this talk right after a break.

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And now our TED Talk of the Day. I'm a professor of organizational behavior. 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 colours represent departments that they belong to. Now when we apply this network perspective to this organisation, we start to see another image of the organisation.

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 gonna leave the organization.

And over the last thirty 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 a 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 co-workers. When there is a crisis, something goes wrong, she can count on them.

And because people talk often, they exchange information about each other's work, they are actually have a lot of recognition at work and validation at work. We also know that they talk frequently. That means communication spreads quickly and effectively, and means that Kelly is able to coordinate quickly. She's able to solve problems fast, and she's able to implement her ideas pretty quickly as well. Alex is in a very different type of network structure.

Alex is in an open network structure which means that her colleagues don't know each other, they don't talk to each other, they have little awareness of each other. What we've learned is that this means well, they come from different social groups, from different functions, from different departments in the organizations that might work in different countries.

And that's important because what we've identified with this is that Alex is exposed to very different information, different perspectives, different ways to think about problems. What this gives Alex is source of information, but also it gives us skills that are developed over time about how to think differently about problems, how to translate a a solution, an idea from one context to another. She has translation skills that have been developed.

Alex also has control over that information which gives her quite a lot of power. So with this network structure we know that Alex tends to be recognized for creativity. She tends to be recognized because she brings different solutions to the table. She sees things from different perspectives and she's able to combine them together.

it's a very powerful position Now As mentioned, we've learned a lot about those network structures, and there's a big body of work over the last three decades that has accumulated evidence, mine included, about all the positive benefits that we can get. from belonging to some of those structures.

but we have very little understanding of any negative outcome. Problems that can be associated with them. Now it might find surprising, it's not a big leap, you know, positive, negative. But it took us or it took me years to realize we don't know those negative aspects. In fact, and it's interesting because there were a few seeds that were planted very early on, a long time ago, when I was doing my PhD.

And I did my PhD in management, but I did my PhD at the same time as my wife. And my wife did her PhD in domestic violence. She was studying victims of domestic violence. And unlike me, I'm a quantitative researcher. That means I use large data sets, I look at statistics, mathematics. My wife actually talks to people. She hears, she listens to the story. And when she was telling me about some of the stories of victims of domestic violence.

What struck me is that some of those victims will stay in abusive relationships for years, decades even. One of the main reasons was that the family and friends of the victims of domestic violence had strong views and particular views about what it means to be in a relationship, about what it means to be married. And they wouldn't let the victims of domestic violence escape from the relationship and break free.

Now, in the world of organizations, there are negative relationships. We can have a difficult coworker, we can have a bad boss, and we can identify them. But we don't know, or we did not know. about the potential negative impacts of those network structures. About six years ago, there was a big rise in consciousness of burnout as the next epidemic in the workplace.

In twenty nineteen, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as an occupational syndrome. It's characterized by exhaustion, by cynicism, and it's typically caused by excessive stress at work. There have been many surveys that have been conducted since then that it's a widespread phenomenon, with forty nine percent of employees in this survey done by McKinsey reporting that they were experiencing some sort, some type of burnout.

One interesting element is that they identify that a toxic work environment will typically cause this burnout. Now, what is a typical work environment? How do you measure it? What does it actually mean? That was vague, that was a bit ambiguous, it's not very precise. And so that's where I thought that network analysis, with its ability to make visible things that are hidden, to characterize networks very precisely, could be helpful. So I studied research projects.

And research projects for the last five to six years, we've been studying and working with seven organisms, different sizes, different industries. Over five thousand employees in total we've worked with. And we've been doing interviews, surveys to capture their um experience of burnout, but also collecting email traffic to understand their positions in social structures.

And we've tried to associate that using predictive models with burnout. And we found that actually those network structures can predict the expense of burnout with a fair amount of precision, over eighty percent precision. Now this is still work in progress. Some papers have been published, but a lot of them have not, and I'm still working on them.

But I wanted to highlight a few of the insights that we've already been able to identify. And these insights I'm c I'm calling them now the four relational tracks. So those four traps they correspond to the two network structures that we discussed before.

The cohesive network structure uh that Kelly is embedded in has the characteristics that people know each other. Kelly's coworkers know each other, they talk with each other, they trust each other, which means that over time, norms of behavior start to emerge And those norms of behaviour they start to say what is appropriate, what is not appropriate to do or to think, and the type of topics that you can raise in the context of the group.

And when those norms become too strong, they can actually feel very binding. 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 communication spa and spread of emotions in at a 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 organization. Then the cohesive structure acts like an eco chamber. It amplifies those negative emotions, which generates 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 tracks. The first one we call it uncontrollable interdependencies and it comes from a study we did with a former student uh in a hospital. In that hospital we identify that nurses who were exposed or who had to rely on very different people in order to deliver their job, to deliver their care.

will actually experience higher level of burnouts. That means when they need to coordinate between the doctors, the radiologists, the legal experts, the the administrative people. Elles vont dépendre de tellement de personnes pour délivrer la santé aux patients qu'ils n'ont pas de contrôle sur la qualité de leur travail ou quand ils peuvent faire leur travail. 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 these many 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.

Uh based on 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 co-workers, 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 coworkers, but it's not easy to identify if you are part of those traps. You know it can feel comfortable to be in Kelly's position, surrounded by close colleagues. You feel well in this group until at some point you start to feel that it's constraining, that it's a little bit too tight.

When you are in Alex's position, you actually feel great. It's very exciting to be exposed to all those different perspectives, these different ideas. But at some point you might feel that you stretch too thin. You're paddle pulled into different directions. And that's at the moment where you might want to stop and think. So what can you do about it? Well, we have a simple recommendation, which would be a first step, is to do a regular relationship health check.

Every six months, for example. And in that check, you ask yourself very simple questions. If you want to identify trap one, do you actually learn from your coworkers? It are the new ideas that you're getting from them and importantly, can you discuss new ideas and perspectives? Can you propose something new without fearing that you're gonna be rejected or dismissed too quickly? For trap two.

You want to ask yourself if people around you still energize you, if you feel that there is a vibe, that you're excited to go to work and to meet your colleagues. Or on the contrary, do you feel that you're exhausted because there's so much gossip, so much frustration that's swirling around you? For trap three.

The question is are you still in control over your work, or do you feel that your work depends on so many different people that you can't ensure the quality or the timeliness of your outcome? And for trap four, do you feel that you're actually constantly pulled in different directions? Are you stretched too thin by all the demands and requests that come to you then?

Okay, so now if you have identified those traps, the question is what do you do about them? If you are in traps one or two If you are like Kelly in that It's cohesive structure and you start to feel the pressure that's coming to you, what you need to do is diversify your network. You need to identify new coworkers that you could interact with.

Simply having lunch or coffee once per month with a new coworker is enough. It gives you a breath of fresh air, different perspectives that you can rely on. You can also try to reduce the interactions with your very close group of colleagues. When you are in in traps three or four in Alex's position, you start to feel stretched too thin. Well you need to refocus on your core group. You need to actually build support in your group. What this might mean is bringing those people together.

creating opportunities that they meet each other, a lunch, an event where they can actually know each other and start to build those connections because that's gonna bypass you to some extent, but create synergies. And where you're not needed to satisfy their demands. So as a summary, networks are great. They are really powerful, they are really important. They have many strong benefits. But there is also a negative side that you should be careful with.

And if there are two things I want you to remember from this talk, it's one, if you are in a position like Kelly, where you have a cohesive network and it's starting to close in, you need to break free. You need actually to identify new people. Create new connections. If you are in Alex position and you see that you have these disconnected contacts that start to pull you in different directions, bring them in, start to close and create a more cohesive network.

For me, that's not the end of the journey. I'm still, as I was when I started my PhD, fascinated and excited by everything we can learn about those networks. And I hope I share some of the excitement today with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. That was Eric Quintane at TEDX ES. in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's

Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos.

Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonsika Sungmar Nivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarazo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. You have the vision for your business. You have the plan. And you just got handed a huge opportunity. But is your business connectivity reliable enough to make a move?

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