Role Overload and Underload

How Do Roles Develop?

To understand role overload and underload, it is helpful to consider how roles develop in organizations. Most people enter organizations with at least some idea of what their role will be. People may be hired to be teachers, bank tellers, college professors, or tax accountants, and based on their knowledge of these jobs, they are likely have some idea of what the role responsibilities will entail. In addition to these expectations, new employees often receive formal job descriptions and communicate with their immediate supervisor regarding role and performance expectations. Other employees (both peers and subordinates) may also communicate their expectations regarding a new employee's role.

All of the sources of role-related information for an employee are known as that person's role set. Within an employee's role set, some members are obviously more important than others (e.g., supervisor), but an employee must pay attention to all members. In an ideal world, the members of an employee's role set would regularly meet to discuss the messages they are conveying and to make sure they are reasonable. Organizations, however, are not ideal, so it is possible that an employee may receive too many or too few role demands, or the demands of different members of the role set may be in conflict. The focus here will be role demands that are too big or too small.

Role Overload: Why Do Roles Become Too Big?

Role overload occurs when an employee's role simply becomes too demanding or too big. What exactly does it mean when a role becomes “too big” for the person occupying it? Role overload may occur in a strictly quantitative sense. That is, the person who occupies a role may simply have more items on his or her to-do list than can be accomplished in the available period of time. Most people, either at work or at home, feel overloaded in this fashion from time to time.

It is also possible for role overload to occur in a more qualitative sense. In this case, an employee may have enough time to accomplish his or her tasks, but the tasks may be too difficult to handle. One example of qualitative overload has to do with the inability to perform any task that is even remotely mechanical. For example, if something in the house is broken and needs to be repaired, one might become qualitatively overloaded.

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