60 Years of Research and We Still Haven’t Solved This

THIS WEEK'S READ

A 2026 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior analyzed six decades of research on workplace stress, bringing together 515 studies and nearly 788,000 workers. Researchers compared three common sources of role stress: having too much work, receiving conflicting demands, and not clearly understanding what is expected of you.

The surprising finding was that role ambiguity, or not knowing what is expected of you, was generally the most damaging of the three. It was associated with worse outcomes across employee well-being, attitudes, behavior, and performance.

We tend to assume that if expectations aren't clear, the solution is better communication. But after six decades of research, we're still seeing the same problem. From a systems perspective, there may be more going on.

OUR TAKE

The expectation gap often starts innocently. A manager believes they have clearly communicated what they need, but the work isn't meeting expectations. So they get more involved: more check-ins, more oversight, more visibility into the work. In the short term, performance may improve, reinforcing the belief that greater oversight was necessary.

But the employee can experience the exact same intervention very differently. Increased oversight can feel like decreased trust, causing them to become more cautious, seek more approval, and make fewer decisions independently. The manager then sees less initiative and has even more reason to step in. Both people are accurately observing the other's behavior, but they may be misdiagnosing why it's happening.

In systems thinking, this can create two familiar patterns. The first is Fixes That Fail, where a solution improves the problem in the short term while unintentionally making it worse over time. The second is Accidental Adversaries, where two people who should be working toward the same goal begin reacting to one another in ways that unintentionally put them at odds.

That's why simply increasing oversight isn't necessarily the answer, but neither is backing away and giving someone more autonomy. Both are solutions being applied before the problem has been diagnosed.

The better place to start is by naming the gap: There is a difference between what we expect and what is actually happening. Before we decide why, let's figure out where that difference is coming from.

That changes the problem from manager versus employee to manager and employee versus the problem. And sometimes that shift is enough to uncover that what looked like a performance problem was actually an expectation problem all along.

YOUR NEXT MOVE

Think about a person or team that isn't delivering what you expected. Before adding more accountability, more communication, or more oversight, ask one question:

Do we actually agree on what is expected?

If the answer isn't an immediate yes, that's probably where the work needs to start.

At Well Led, we help organizations identify the dynamics underneath persistent challenges so they can stop treating symptoms and start solving the right problem.

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