It’s not them, it’s the role

Three years into Australia’s psychosocial regulations, the frameworks are in place, yet serious mental health claims jumped 14.7% last year and have grown 161% over the past decade, the fastest rise of any injury category. With AI adoption and restructuring reshaping work through 2026, the everyday conditions our teams work within matter more than ever.

A recent meta-analysis drawing on 60 years of research and nearly 800,000 employees confirms how reliably role stressors undermine performance, wellbeing, and retention across almost every type of workplace (Sawhney et al., 2026). Three distinct types emerge: role ambiguity (unclear expectations), role conflict (incompatible demands), and role overload (too much, too little time), and each calls for a different response.

Our opportunity is to move beyond risk compliance to design workplaces where people can genuinely do their best work.

What 60 years of research found

Role ambiguity was the most broadly damaging, accounting for much of the variation in job satisfaction, work engagement, task performance, and organisational commitment. When people don’t know what success looks like, discretionary effort evaporates.

Role conflict was the strongest predictor of burnout, psychological distress, and turnover intentions. Being pulled in incompatible directions or asked to act against your values is demoralising, stressful and a retention risk.

Role overload showed the strongest association with negative emotions or attitudes, and physical symptoms. Sustained overload is depleting and saps motivation and energy.

Are your people unclear, conflicted, or overloaded?

Think about the last time someone on your team came to you looking flat or quietly struggling. Chances are the root cause wasn’t poor attitude or lack of effort, it was likely something structural and potentially easily addressed.

What actually helps

Role stressors are shaped by leadership, systems, and support which means they are in large part, preventable. The research points to clear levers:

Autonomy and feedback emerged as two of the strongest buffers.

In practice: A team leader replaces weekly status meetings with fortnightly 20-minute check-ins built around three questions: what’s working, what’s getting in the way, and what would help. The team leader sets the outcome and constraints for each project then leaves the how to the team. Within a quarter, two team members say they feel clearer about expectations than they have in years.

Supervisor supportconsistently reduced all three stressors.

In practice: A finance manager notices their analyst has had three urgent deadlines stack up in a fortnight. Instead of adding another request, they sit down together, look at the full workload and reprioritise, deferring one piece, reassigning another, and protecting Friday afternoons for deep work. Fifteen minutes of conversation changes how the analyst experiences the next month.

Perceived organisational support, whether people genuinely believe the organisation has their back, was one of the strongest predictors across all three stressors.

In practice: When an employee discloses a serious health issue, the organisation doesn’t wait for them to ask. The manager builds a flexible return-to-work plan, HR proactively connects them with the EAP and adjusts KPIs for the quarter. Their executive sponsor checks in, not to manage performance, but to ask what would help. The team member doesn’t forget. Neither does their team, who watch how the organisation behaves when someone is struggling.

• Ambiguity check: does your team genuinely know what’s expected of them and how success will be measured?
• Conflict check: are there competing priorities or policies creating impossible choices for them?
• Overload check: are workloads genuinely manageable, or are people carrying more than they can sustainably hold?

References

SafeWork Australia (2025). Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025. https://data.safeworkaustralia.gov.au/insights/key-whs-statistics-australia/latest-release

Sawhney, G., McCord, M. A., Cunningham, A., Cook, P., Adjei, K., & Flinn, T. (2026). A meta-analytic review of 60 years of role stressor research. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 167, 104234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2026.104234