Executive Summary

Burnout has become an epidemic across industries, with a significant numbers of employees and managers experiencing chronic stress and exhaustion. While many organizations attempt to solve this dire issue through wellness programs and other surface-level interventions, these efforts often fail to tackle the deeper, systemic dysfunctions that are at the heart of the problem.

At a foundational level, organizations and leadership often unknowingly operate from a limiting scarcity narrative about value, worth, and sufficiency, when managing people. This approach dehumanizes individuals, dismissing their most valuable asset—their humanity and lived experiences. It places undue pressure on employees to perform, raising their stress levels and creating a cascade of emotional triggers that lead to profound physiological an psychological impacts, trapping them up in a cycle of stress, exhaustion, and burnout.

This white paper, the first in a series, explores how leadership, culture, and organizational structures contribute to this pervasive problem. Future papers will offer human-centered solutions designed to transform these patterns, fostering environments that advance human potential, growth, and fulfillment—ensuring long term success for both people and organizations.

Introduction

Burnout has reached epidemic proportions, affecting individuals at all levels of organizations and across industries. Currently statistics reveal that approximately 65% of employees and more than 50% of managers are experiencing burnout (isolved, 2024, HBR, 2023). Yet, most organizations continue to address this issue with surface-level solutions - failing to recognize the deeper root causes or their role in creating toxic workplace environments (McKinsey Health Institute, 2022).

Burnout is not simply a result of personal resilience or stress management failures. Based on my experience with burnout and recovery, as well as my interdisciplinary background in engineering, naturopathic medical studies, formative psychology, strategic organizational management, and human-centered design - I have observed that burnout is a complex, multi-layered process driven by deeply ingrained organizational dysfunctions. At the core, these dysfunctions include limiting narratives about value, worth, and sufficiency, permeate leadership, culture, and structure. These scarcity-driven narratives lay the foundation for a cascade of emotional triggers and downward spirals, profoundly affecting individuals at both physiological and psychological levels, ultimately driving them toward exhaustion and burnout.

This paper, the first in a series, delves into how these limiting organizational patterns in leadership, culture and structure contribute to employee ill-being and burnout. By examining these deeper issues holistically, we can better understand the profound human and organizational impact. Future papers will present human-centered solutions that address these dysfunctional patterns, promoting long-term human and organizational wellbeing, sustainability and growth.

Understanding the Real Problem: Underlying Root Causes

Research points to several key factors that consistently contribute to burnout across various organizations and industries, including excessive workload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, lack of support, lack of fairness and mismatched values & skills (HBR, 2023). While addressing these factors may provide temporary relief, this approach is often palliative at best, because these are just surface-level symptoms of deeper systemic dysfunctions.

From my interdisciplinary background and experience, I have observed that organizations and leadership unconsciously operate from a limiting scarcity narrative about value, worth and sufficiency when managing people. This approach not only objectifies individuals, but also dehumanizes them—ignoring and dismissing their most valuable asset: their humanity and lived experiences. It reduces people’s value and worth to limited, external terms, eventually placing them in categories or boxes.

This scarcity narrative compels leaders to demand more—more output, more performance, more urgency—with limited support or resources. Such an approach pushes people into chronic stress or survival mode, while also unconsciously reinforcing individuals’ own limiting beliefs about their worth—such as "not being enough”—and potentially triggering their unresolved emotional experiences that initially internalized these beliefs. All of these elements feed into a culture that already thrives on stress, fear, and scarcity, draining both individuals and organization, eventually leading to burnout.

To create effective change, organizations must go beyond surface-level solutions, and address these deep-seated systemic patterns in leadership, culture and structure, that perpetuate chronic stress. Research shows that leadership, culture, and organizational systems are often key contributors to employee ill-being (McKinsey Health Institute, 2022).

Rather than placing the onus on employees to manage their stress and workload, leaders must recognize how their unconscious scarcity-driven narratives, beliefs, norms, practices, and behaviors contribute to creating dysfunctional workplace environments. These limiting strategies often escalate into unrealistic demands, further entrenching environments of fear, disconnection, and stress. By evolving leadership in a way that honors people’s intrinsic value and purpose, leaders can become the catalyst for thriving cultures, human-sustainable structures, and long-term success.

A Plant Analogy for Organizational Dysfunction

Consider an organization as a living organism, much like a plant, as illustrated in Figure 1 below. When a plant’s leaves turn brown or dry up, it’s not because the leaves themselves are malfunctioning; it’s because the environment meant to nourish them is failing. Similarly, when employees burn out, it’s not because they’re at fault, but because the organizational environment—the leadership, culture, and structure —meant to support them is failing.

**Figure 1**: The Plant Analogy for Organizational Dysfunction

This analogy and diagram are based on my original concepts, drawing on my experience in organizational leadership and development. While others, such as Schein (2019), have explored organizations as living systems, this specific analogy and visual representation are unique to my perspective.

At the root of this dysfunction are limiting narratives—deeply ingrained in leadership beliefs, norms, practices, and patterns (the roots)—that shape the organizational culture. These narratives influence how leaders view and manage people, often through a lens of scarcity, affecting how they perceive employees’ value, worth, and sufficiency in relation to external performance metrics. Just as the health of a plant depends on the integrity of its roots, the well-being of individuals depends on the integrity of leadership and the quality of the culture they cultivate.

When leadership operates from these limiting narratives, it creates a culture of scarcity (the soil) where employees’ own limiting beliefs—such as “not being enough”—are continuously reinforced. This culture, characterized by constant stress and demands for more output with insufficient support, pushes employees into chronic stress and survival mode. As a result, employees experience ill-being (the withered leaves), leading to disengagement, exhaustion, and eventual burnout.

While each employee’s experience may vary, these intersecting dynamics—rooted in scarcity-driven narratives within leadership, culture and structure—often contribute to increasing disconnection and stress across teams, fostering an unhealthy and unsustainable environment. For a detailed, real-life case study on how these deeply ingrained patterns manifest in an organization, and the profound impacts on employees, please refer to the accompanying case study A personal Journey Through Burnout & Recovery.

Figure 2 below illustrates these dynamics, showing how dysfunctional patterns in leadership and structure (the roots) feed into a toxic culture (the soil), leading to disengaged employees and burnout (the withered leaves).

**Figure 2**: The Plant Analogy for Organizational Dysfunction

However, when leadership shifts its narrative to one of abundance, support, and advancement, and applies it to creating human-supporting structures, it cultivates a culture and broader organizational environment that meets employees' needs, nurtures their growth, and promotes their highest potential and well-being. As a result, employees feel uplifted, fulfilled and inspired to do their best work. This creates a cycle of thriving, where both employees and the organization flourish together, as illustrated in Figure 3 below.

**Figure 3**: The Plant Analogy for Organizational Effectiveness

The Deeper Impact on Employees & Organizations

Impact on Employees

From my background and experience, I’ve observed that unaddressed dysfunctional patterns have a profound and multifaceted impact on employees and managers, leading to significant negative outcomes for both individuals and organizations. While the burnout phenomenon has been widely researched (McKinsey Health Institute, 2022), my multidisciplinary, human-centered theory explores how the interplay of these unhealthy dynamics creates the spiraling journey toward chronic stress, exhaustion and burnout.

At the core are limiting leadership narratives that shape how employees are managed and perceived. These scarcity narratives—rooted in limiting beliefs about people’s value, worth, and sufficiency—not only filter down to employees, reinforcing their own limiting beliefs of “not being enough”, but also dehumanize them by reducing their worth to external metrics. This objectification pushes employees to feel as though they exist solely for performance, stripping them of their intrinsic value and reinforcing a sense of disempowerment.

As leadership demands more from employees, often without adequate support, it not only increases their stress but also triggers their fight-flight response, potentially reactivating past emotional experiences. This drives employees deeper into exhaustion.

Burnout typically manifests as stress, mental health decline, and disengagement, but these terms only scratch the surface of a more complex journey. The path to ill-being is a transformative process that gradually erodes employees’ sense of self, leaving them in a state of despair, worthlessness, and disempowerment.

Here are the key elements I’ve observed in dysfunctional environments:

Continuous unresolved workplace challenges—such as lack of support, excessive workload or toxic culture—are often linked to deeper dysfunctions in leadership and culture, shaped by scarcity and insufficiency narratives.
These limiting narratives—become a constant reminder to employees of their own limiting beliefs about their value and worth. The continuous unresolved challenges and narrative dynamics create a spiraling loop that leads to chronic stress.
Chronic stress has the power to :
- Activate the fight-or-flight (F-F) response—the body’s immediate reaction to perceived danger or threat (Bremner, 2006; van der Kolk, 2014).
- Trigger unresolved emotional experiences—often from childhood—that mirror current workplace challenges, causing employees to unconsciously react based on past emotional patterns, which further amplifies their stress (Sherin & Nemeroff, 2011; McClelland, 2019).
At this point, employees may not just be dealing with work stress but also unconsciously confronting old memories—reliving limiting narratives, beliefs, fears, and wounds that originally internalized the feeling of 'not being enough.'
Normalization of stress:
- Chronic stress often becomes normalized, with leaders and employees unaware of how their limiting narratives and maladaptive behaviors contribute to a toxic culture. This leads to a persistent fight-flight-freeze state, where employees operate in emotional survival mode, creating a culture marked by anxiety, fear, lack of presence and disempowerment.
- Leadership often fails to recognize this as a systemic issue, accepting chronic stress as a by-product of work, and perpetuating the dysfunctional environment that leads to burnout.
These stress-induced patterns are often mistaken for personal failings, making it difficult for employees to thrive, and further promoting a cycle of disengagement.
Manifestation of burnout: (American Medical Association, 2023, Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001):
- Emotional exhaustion: Fatigue and the inability to emotionally engage with work or colleagues.
- Depersonalization: Detachment from work and people, leading to disconnection.
- Inefficacy: A deep sense of failure and loss of purpose, further intensifying burnout.
Ultimately, the journey becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, echoing emotional patterns from the past, such as “not being enough”, leading to feelings of failure and the erosion of their sense of value and purpose.

Visual Representation of the Broader Employee Impact

1️⃣ Outer loop - Individual State : Continuous unaddressed challenges are often rooted in scarcity-driven leadership narratives and other deeper organizational dysfunctions. The lack of support and resources to resolve these challenges increases stress. This scarcity narrative reinforces the employees' limiting beliefs of "not being enough," perpetuating a cycle of increasing stress that culminates in chronic stress, shown in the middle loop. For examples of scarcity-driven leadership narratives and other organizational dysfunctions please refer to the accompanying case study A personal Journey Through Burnout & Recovery.

2️⃣ Middle loop - Collective State : Chronic stress activates the fight-flight response and may reactivate past emotional memories and maladaptive behaviors—which normalize in the organizational culture. As employees unconsciously react based on past emotional patterns, maladaptive behaviors become embedded in the culture, reinforcing the dysfunction. This cycle repeats until it leads to emotional exhaustion, in the inner loop.

3️⃣ Inner loop - Burnout State : Emotional exhaustion, caused by prolonged stress and the reinforcement of scarcity narratives, leads to disengagement. Employees eventually internalize their limiting beliefs, fulfilling self-fulfilling prophecies like “not being enough,” which manifests as inefficacy, feelings of unworthiness, and disempowerment.

This process leaves both employees and the organization struggling with diminished engagement, decreased productivity, and an environment that reinforces further dysfunction. The next section delves into more details on the organizational impact.

**Figure 4**: The Employee Experience - How Unaddressed Challenges Lead to Chronic Stress & Burnout

Impact on Organizations

Unaddressed dysfunction doesn’t just affect employees—it also takes a toll on the entire organization. Based on my background and experience, when leadership operates continuously from a scarcity narrative, a critical mass of employees begins to function from a constant state of emotional reactivity—causing the organizational environment to become increasingly toxic and dysfunctional.

Leaders may fail to recognize behaviors such as withdrawal, conflict avoidance, or aggression as stress responses, often stemming from the failure to provide psychological safety. This is especially true if the leaders themselves are chronically stressed and operating from their own limiting beliefs.

This collective emotional survival mode creates a persistent cycle of stress triggers and maladaptive behaviors, feeding into a larger Culture of Resistance—marked by fear, mistrust, and disengagement. In such environments, employee well-being is compromised and organizational performance suffers. Over time, engagement and innovation decline, leading to increased turnover, absenteeism, low morale and lost productivity.

The financial impact is staggering, costing organizations billions annually (SHRM, 2019).

Visual Representation: Culture of Resistance

Drawing from my background and experience, I’ve developed the two figures below to offer visual contrast between a Culture of Resistance and a Culture of Collaboration.

Figure 5 below illustrates the downward spiral of a Culture of Resistance—highlighting how fear and scarcity lead to disempowerment and cynicism, ultimately stifling growth, accountability, and innovation.

**Figure 5**: Culture of Resistance in Dysfunctional Organization Resulting from Fear & Scarcity Mindset

Contrast with a Culture of Collaboration

In contrast, Figure 6 below illustrates the upward spiral of a Culture of Collaboration, where psychological safety and an abundance narrative foster autonomy and a sense of belonging. In such environments, employees and managers are empowered to actively contribute to growth, leading to connection, thriving communities, and continuous improvement. In these organizations, both people and organizations flourish together.

Given these contrasts, which environment would you prefer for your organization?

**Figure 6**: Culture of Collaboration in Thriving Organization Driven by Psychological Safety & an Abundance Mindset

The Need for a Holistic & Human-Centered Approach

Addressing burnout effectively requires more than superficial fixes or isolated interventions, as chronic stress and exhaustion are caused by more than just a lack of resilience and stress management failures. From my background and experience, burnout is a complex, multi-layered process driven by deeply ingrained organizational dysfunctions.

At the core, these dysfunctions include unconscious limiting narratives about value, worth and sufficiency, that permeate leadership, culture and structure, placing employees in demanding yet unsupportive environments. These limiting beliefs not only dehumanize employees by reducing their value to mere productivity and external metrics, but also reinforce individuals’ limiting beliefs about their own value and worth. These scarcity-driven narratives lay the foundation for a cascade of triggers and downward spirals, profoundly affecting individuals at both physiological and psychological levels, ultimately driving them toward exhaustion and burnout.

This underscores the need for a comprehensive, human-centered strategy that recognizes the complex interplay of limiting leadership narratives, cultural dysfunction, and structural inefficiencies. In my opinion, here’s why such an approach is essential:

1. Burnout is a Systemic Issue, Not Just an Individual Problem:

Traditional solutions often focus on individual resilience or stress management. However, burnout stems from systemic dysfunction in leadership, culture and structure. At a core level, leadership’s unconscious limiting narratives about employee value dehumanize individuals, causing environments that push employees into survival mode, and impacts them physiologically and psychologically.

A human-centered strategy addresses the root dysfunction within leadership and culture, rather than just placing the responsibility on the individual.

2. Physiological and Psychological Dimensions:

Burnout affects people across all realms—the mental, emotional, physical, energetic dimensions. Chronic stress, triggered by scarcity-driven leadership narratives, activates individuals’ fight-flight response and reactivates unresolved emotional memories, causing people to respond to present day challenges using past maladaptive behavioral patterns. This creates continuous cycles of dysfunction, leading to toxic work environments.

A human-centered approach takes into account the whole person, promoting holistic well-being, while advancing human potential and fulfillment—rather than focusing solely on productivity metrics.

3. Chronic Stress & Toxic Work Environments:

Leaders must recognize the unconscious narratives and behaviors that trigger emotional survival responses in themselves and their teams to break the dysfunctional cycle of chronic stress and toxic work environments.

A human-centered approach requires recognizing and addressing the unconscious undercurrents, leadership limiting beliefs, norms, and patterns that drive limiting narratives and maladaptive behaviors. By evolving individuals’ awareness in ways that honor and expand human value and worth, people will foster cultures with psychologically safety, trust, autonomy and belonging. This will in turn move employees out of survival mode and into a space where they maintain equanimity, contribute meaningfully, grow continuously and thrive.

4. People are More Than Their Output:

A purely productivity-focused approach treats employees as tools for organizational output, and dehumanizes them, which contribute to feelings of worthlessness and burnout. When people are valued only for what they produce, it not only neglects their emotional and psychological needs, but also dismisses their inherent infinite worth.

A human-centered model emphasizes the intrinsic value of employees beyond their productivity, focusing on their growth, development, and well-being. This creates a more engaged, inspired, and thriving workforce.

5. A Shift from Scarcity to Abundance Narrative:

Many organizations operate from a scarcity narrative —competing for limited resources, overworking staff, and focusing on short-term goals. This approach dismisses people’s humanity and lived experiences, reducing their value to what they can produce.

A human-centered approach cultivates a culture of abundance, where organizations invest in people’s human potential and growth. By shifting to abundance, employees feel empowered and inspired to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s long-term success.

6. Fosters Psychological Safety and Trust:

Burnout often stems from environments where there is a lack of psychological safety, transparency, and trust. Employees who feel unsafe to express their needs, make mistakes, or provide feedback are more likely to be guarded and untrusting, leading to further stress and disengagement.

By creating psychologically safe environments where employees can voice concerns, collaborate openly, and trust leadership, a human-centered approach reduces the emotional and psychological strain that leads to burnout.

7. Alignment Between Organizational Values and Employee Well-Being:

When there is a disconnect between the organization's values and employees' well-being, burnout is more likely. Employees may feel their values are misaligned with the organization’s, leading to disengagement and dissatisfaction.

A human-centered approach aligns organizational values and goals with human well-being and advancement, ensuring that employees feel a sense of purpose and fulfillment in their roles. This enhances job satisfaction and reduces the likelihood of burnout.

8. Long-Term Human Sustainability for People and Organizational Success:

Organizations that focus solely on short-term productivity often experience high turnover, disengagement, and burnout. This approach is unsustainable for people and costly for organizations in the long term.

By focusing on advancing human potential, growth and well-being, a human-centered approach ensures employees are honored for their intrinsic value and purpose, while organizations are empowered to thrive by fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous advancement.

A holistic, human-centered approach to burnout is essential because it addresses the complex, multi-dimensional nature of this issue. It shifts the focus from merely managing stress or increasing productivity to addressing the deep-seated organizational dysfunction and advancing the well-being and human potential of people as whole individuals. By evolving leadership and cultivating environments that nurture and advance human potential, organizations can mitigate burnout, foster fulfillment, and ensure long-term success.

Conclusion

Burnout is not simply the result of personal inadequacies or an inability to manage stress—it’s a reflection of deep-seated organizational dysfunctions.

At the core, leadership is unconsciously driven by scarcity-based narratives that dehumanizes people, reducing them to their productivity output and reinforcing their self-limiting beliefs regarding their value, worth and sufficiency. When leadership dysfunction and limiting narratives are ignored, employees experience chronic stress and emotional strain, often without realizing they are operating in survival mode and responding from past experiences to current day challenges. This leads to maladaptive behaviors, reinforcing organizational dysfunction and eroding employees' sense of value and purpose. The resulting negative culture—marked by fear, scarcity, and disempowerment—creates unsustainable work environments and burned-out employees. For further exploration of how these dysfunctions manifest in a real-world example, see the case study A Personal Journey Through Burnout & Recovery.

Much like a plant needs healthy roots and nourishing soil to thrive, organizations must cultivate environments where people feel they can flourish. This involves evolving leadership, cultivating human-sustaining cultures, and building human-supportive structures.

To address burnout effectively, organizations must shift their focus from:

Viewing employees as mere productivity tools to consciously recognizing them as whole human beings with infinite value and worth, who have multi-dimensional needs - mental, emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual.
Offering surface-level solutions to implementing human-centered approaches that address the deeper dysfunctions in leadership, culture and structure.
Moving beyond well-being programs to advancing human potential, growth and fulfillment.

A holistic, human-centered approach that nurtures well-being while unlocking growth and purpose ensures that employees feel supported, empowered and fulfilled. A conscious leadership shift towards this approach directly prevents burnout by fostering a culture that honors humans’ intrinsic value and worth simply for existing. By embracing an abundance narrative, evolving leadership, promoting human-supportive cultures, and advancing human potential—leaders can create environments where both people and organizations thrive and succeed together.

What’s Next?

This is the first paper in a series offering a revolutionary approach and human-centered perspective to addressing burnout and creating sustainable, thriving environments for both people and organizations. Stay tuned for upcoming installments focused on human-centered solutions to shift the deeper dysfunctions in leadership, culture and structure. The next white paper, titled "Addressing the Underlying Organizational Dysfunctions: A Multidisciplinary & Human-Centered Approach" is coming soon.

References

Note: Some articles or resources from McKinsey Health Institute and other sources may require a subscription to access the full content.

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SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management). (2019). Toxic workplace cultures are costing employers billions. Society for Human Resource Management. Retrieved from Link to SHRM Article
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The Hidden Causes of Burnout: How Deep-Seated Organizational Factors Drive Employee Ill-Being