The advice to set better boundaries at work has become close to a default response to feeling overwhelmed by a job. Say no to the extra meeting. Turn off notifications after six. Stop answering messages on the weekend. The therapist and author Nedra Glover Tawwab built a career on formalising this advice: her 2021 book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace, spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and helped grow her following to nearly two million people by 2023, and she was named to the Time100 Health list in 2024. The premise, in a job context, is that the person under pressure needs better personal limits.
A separate, older, and much less quoted body of research asks a different question: whether the limits that actually matter are personal at all.
Where the burnout research points instead
The psychologist Christina Maslach began studying occupational burnout in the 1970s and, working with Michael Leiter, spent the following decades building a case that burnout is primarily an organisational problem rather than a personal one. Their argument, laid out across multiple studies and summarised in a 2016 review in World Psychiatry, is that burnout results from a chronic mismatch between a person and specific, identifiable features of their job, not from a person’s failure to protect their own time.
Maslach and Leiter’s framework names six areas where that mismatch occurs: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. A job can be reasonable on any five of these and still produce burnout if it is badly mismatched on one, an unmanageable workload most consistently, followed by a values conflict between what the job asks of someone and what they believe the work is for. This is not a single study’s finding. It is a research programme that has been tested, translated, and validated across multiple countries and workplace types over roughly three decades, which is a different kind of evidence than one striking paper. Researchers have since adapted the underlying measure, the Areas of Worklife Scale, into other languages and workforces, including validation studies in German and Spanish-speaking samples, largely reproducing the same six-factor structure rather than requiring a different model for each country.
Workload and values consistently emerge as the two areas most strongly tied to burnout across this body of work, ahead of control, reward, community, and fairness, though all six interact rather than operating independently. A job can survive an imperfect score on most of these dimensions. It is workload pushed well past what is sustainable, or a values conflict between what someone believes the work is supposed to accomplish and what they are actually asked to do day to day, that the research finds hardest for people to absorb without burning out.
What this suggests inside a fast-growing company
The distinction is not abstract for workplaces built around rapid growth and small teams, where headcount often lags the workload a company has already committed to delivering. A team that scaled its product roadmap before scaling its staffing is describing, in the areas-of-worklife framework, a workload mismatch. No individual policy of protecting personal evenings changes the size of the roadmap. The research does not argue against personal boundaries in that setting. It argues that boundaries are being asked to compensate for a staffing or scoping decision made somewhere else in the organisation, which is a different kind of fix than the one a boundaries book is written to provide.
Why the boundaries framing is not simply wrong
None of this means Tawwab’s advice is bad advice, and it would be unfair to read the burnout research as a rebuttal of it. Setting boundaries, saying no to some requests, and protecting personal time are reasonable and often effective responses to a demanding job, and countless people report real relief from doing exactly what her book describes. The two frameworks are answering different questions. Boundaries address what a person can control inside a job they cannot redesign: how much of their own time and attention they choose to give beyond what is asked, and how clearly they communicate their limits to colleagues and managers. The areas-of-worklife model addresses what the job itself is structured to demand in the first place, workload, autonomy, recognition, social support, perceived fairness, and alignment between someone’s values and the job’s actual purpose. A better boundary can reduce the damage of a badly designed job. It does not redesign the job.
What gets lost when the two are treated as interchangeable
The risk in leaning entirely on the boundaries framing is that it quietly relocates responsibility for a structural mismatch onto the individual experiencing it. If someone’s workload is genuinely unmanageable, a values conflict is genuinely present, or the reward and recognition structure is genuinely unfair, no amount of turning off notifications changes the underlying arithmetic of the job. Maslach and Leiter’s own framing is explicit about this: burnout, in their model, is what results when demands exceed the resources a person has to meet them, and personal coping strategies are a resource, but not the only one, and often not the largest one available.
This matters for how a workplace, rather than just an individual, might actually respond to widespread burnout. A company that encourages employees to set better boundaries while leaving workload, unclear reward structures, or a mismatch between stated values and daily practice untouched is treating a structural problem with an individual-level tool. That does not mean the tool is useless. It means it is being asked to do work it was never designed to do alone.
What this does not resolve
Neither framework settles the harder, more specific question of what any particular overwhelmed person or team should actually change first, because that depends on which of the six areas is most mismatched in that specific job, something the areas-of-worklife research is explicit about needing to diagnose case by case rather than assume. A person with a fair, well-resourced job who still struggles to switch off in the evening is probably better served by Tawwab’s approach. A person in a chronically understaffed role with an unmanageable workload is being asked to solve an organisational problem with a personal habit, and the research suggests that substitution has real limits.
The more useful question, for anyone reaching for advice on either side of this, may not be which framework is right, but which one actually describes the mismatch they are living with.
