4 relationship traps that lead to burnout | Eric Quintane

0:03You'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.

0:18Eric Quintane: A toxic work environment will typically cause burnout. That's Eric Quintane, 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.

0:58We'll dive into this talk right after a break.

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3:54And now our TED Talk of the day.

3:57Eric Quintane: 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 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.

4:48Eric Quintane: 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 surround 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.

5:32Eric Quintane: 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.

6:17Eric Quintane: 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 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. It 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.

7:01Eric Quintane: 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 her skills that are developed over time about how to think differently about problems, how to translate a solution, an idea from one context to another.

7:41Eric Quintane: She has translation skills that are being 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.

8:24Eric Quintane: But we have very little understanding of any negative outcomes, 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.

9:07Eric Quintane: That means I use large data sets. I look at statistics, mathematics. My wife actually talks to people. She hears, she listens to the stories. 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.

10:00Eric Quintane: Now, in the world of organizations, there are negative relationships. We can have a difficult co-worker, 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 2019, 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 49 % of employees in this survey done by McKinsey reporting that they were experiencing some sort, some type of burnout.

10:54Eric Quintane: 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 organizations, different sizes, different industries, over 5 ,000 employees in total we've worked with.

11:38Eric Quintane: And we've been doing interviews, surveys to capture their 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 experience of burnout with a fair amount of precisions, over 80 % precisions. Now, this is still a 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.

12:17Eric Quintane: And these insights, I'm calling them now the four relational traps. So those four traps, they correspond to the two network structures that we discussed before. The cohesive network structure that Kelly is embedded in has the characteristics that people know each other. Kelly's co-workers 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 behavior, 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.

12:55Eric Quintane: 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 interest of the person diverges substantially from the interest 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 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.

13:45Eric Quintane: 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 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 eco-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.

14:34Eric Quintane: 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.

15:18Eric Quintane: 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 co-workers, are significantly more likely to experience burnout.

16:01Eric Quintane: 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. 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.

16:43Eric Quintane: You're 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, 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 co-workers? Are there new ideas that you're getting from them? And importantly, can you discuss new ideas and perspective? Can you propose something new without fearing that you're going to be rejected or dismissed too quickly?

17:24Eric Quintane: 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 outcomes? And for trap four, do you feel that you're actually constantly pulled in different directions?

18:01Eric Quintane: Are you stretched too thin by all the demands and requests that come to your desk? 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 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 co-workers that you could interact with. Simply having lunch or coffee once per month with a new co-worker 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.

18:44Eric Quintane: When you are in traps three or four in Alex's position, you start to feel stretched too thin. Well, you need to refocus on your co-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 going to 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.

19:23Eric Quintane: There are many strong benefits, but there are 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's 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.

20:02Eric Quintane: 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.

20:23That was Eric Quintain at TEDxESMT Berlin in 2025. If you're curious about 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 Sungmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.

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