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Designed versus Demanded: What Research Indicates Is Being Asked of Leaders in 2026 and the Combined Toll on Mental Health

While the topic of wellbeing is core to our purpose and is always on the agenda for the Thrive Advisory team, mental health is particularly top of mind throughout October as Mental Health Month. The 2026 Mental Health Australia’s theme is Together We Thrive and we could not be more on board. The research we have reviewed this year bolsters the assumption that thriving at work is something leaders and their organisations need to design together.

Professor Brené Brown shared that she believes we are becoming increasingly dysregulated, distrustful and disconnected.

“I don’t think people are okay… I think collectively we are dysregulated, distrustful and disconnected. I think that makes leading particularly difficult right now.”  Professor Brené Brown, HBR IdeaCast (2025).

Unfortunately, our client experience, our research review and our Thrive Advisory Team discussions have led us to the same conclusion and checklist of concerns.

In October 2023, we wrote about wellbeing washing and the widening gap between what organisations say about wellbeing and what they actually do.  In October 2024, we wrote about what the emerging research was telling us about burnout. Our thesis then was that burnout is structural but is still treated as an individual problem. Interestingly, I made the same arguments regarding burnout, gendered burnout and other gendered career outcomes (performance ratings, compensation and promotion) more than 20 years ago culminating in my doctoral dissertation research. We went back to both our Thrive articles and my doctoral research findings this month to check for currency and relevance. What struck us was how little the key tenets, principles and frameworks have changed. Sadly, what has changed is the starkness and gravity of the recent research evidence that serve to buttress our original provocations.

What Has Held

From our prior work, many tenets still stand including the following key assumptions and trends:

1.  Trust is decreasing across leadership levels. Lower trust in leaders strongly predicts higher employee burnout, psychological distress and overall mental health decline. Trust in leaders and organisations has dropped across multiple global studies in 2025 and 2026 due to the collective impacts of rapid restructuring, AI integration and shifting workplace policies. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust at Work study, trust in CEOs dropped from 70% to 66%, trust in direct managers fell from 79% to 72% and trust in coworkers declined from 82% to 73%.

Research highlights that a lack of trust acts as a primary psychological stressor .For example, DDI Global Leadership Forecast (2025–2026 data) tracked how a lack of trust amplifies burnout risk among management and frontline workers and found:

• Leaders who do not trust senior leadership are 3 times more likely to report significant concerns about burnout.
• Leaders who lack trust in their immediate direct managers face a 2 times higher risk of burnout.

DDI explicitly links low trust to “psychological insecurity” and “communication strain,” noting that working under leaders you do not trust forces employees to constantly filter messaging, which drastically spikes emotional exhaustion.

2.   Burnout is driven by context, culture and how work is designed versus who is doing it. The McKinsey Health Institute’s 2022 survey of 14,509 employees across 15 countries found that toxic workplace behaviour predicted more than 60% of the variance in burnout symptoms, far ahead of any individual factor. We have not unearthed any published research since then that would overturn this finding. We outline further role design research later in this article.

3.   Leaders and employees see different realities. The same McKinsey research found employers rated every dimension of workplace wellbeing more favourably than their employees did, with an average gap of 22%.

4.   The people who take wellbeing most seriously carry a particular toll. In 2023, we observed that the more seriously leaders take their team’s wellbeing, the greater the cost to their own health. The 2026 data have given that observation additional weighting and gravity. Gallup’s 2026 Workplace Metrics directly capture the personal cost leaders pay for carrying the weight of their teams. While “managers of managers” report higher overall life evaluation and thriving rates than individual contributors (32% vs lower baselines), they suffer significantly higher daily negative friction:

• 39% of leaders experience intense daily stress.
• 20% report acute daily loneliness, a side-effect of balancing the empathy required by their teams with the compliance required by executives.
• Global manager engagement has simultaneously dropped by 9 percentage points since 2022, settling at a sluggish 22%.

 

What Has Worsened

1. Mental health conditions have grown faster than any other category of serious workers’ compensation claim in Australia over the past decade. Safe Work Australia’s Key Work Health and Safety Statistics for Australia reported 17,900 serious claims for mental health conditions in 2024–2025, comprising 12.2% of all serious claims. This has increased by 169% since 2014–2015. In 2023–2024 the median mental health claim paid $68,600 in compensation, more than 4 times the $16,100 for all other serious claims. The median time off work was 34.8 weeks against 7.0.
2. Burnout rates are on the rise. Beyond Blue and Infinite Potential released The State of Workplace Burnout 2026 last week which surveyed 1,815 workers across 12 countries including close to 1,000 Australians. More than 1 in 3 Australian workers met the World Health Organization definition of burnout. People in organisations with high “system friction” (i.e., poorly designed processes and systems) had 84% higher odds of burnout. It is a small sample, but the direction matches everything else we are observing and hearing from our clients and colleagues.
3. The squeeze on leaders. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, drawn from more than 140 countries, found that senior leaders report higher thriving than the people they lead, 43% against a global figure of 34%. They also report worse days, with more stress, anger, sadness and loneliness the previous day than their teams. Manager engagement has fallen 9 points since 2022. Gallup attributes most of the global decline in engagement to that one group.
4. Holistic leader wellbeing is declining dramatically. Thrive Advisory’s key wellbeing partner, Audrey McGibbon of EEK & SENSE who authored the GLWS® Executive Wellbeing Tool, describes the same pattern has emerged in their analysis from a database of almost 10,000 global leaders who have taken the GLWS across the past decade.

GLWS Research Results (2026)

Audrey shared with the Thrive team this month that the GLWS updated benchmark of 9,986 leaders and professionals shows a set of startling statistics, culminating in a stark pattern of declining wellbeing and stress resilience:

• In 2016, 17.9% of leaders and professionals were thriving at work. By 2026 it had dropped to 10.6%.
• In 2016, 25% of participants reported they were struggling. This figure has risen to 41% over the same period.
• Life satisfaction has fallen fastest since 2023.

Managers and team leaders report the lowest wellbeing of any level, with 70% feeling drained at work at least sometimes against 56% of executives.

Only 7.5% of managers and team leaders report they are thriving at work – the lowest of any organisational level.

Younger leaders are suffering significantly. Only 6.9% of leaders and professionals aged 35 and under are thriving at work – vs 23.9% of those 56+.

Of the participants who are 35 years old or younger:

• 34% say their workload usually or always puts them at burnout risk
• 74% doubt themselves at work, implying mounting imposter experiences

Of the 1,178 people who rated themselves as thriving, about a third also scored in the danger zone on at least 1 pace or burnout item: a race against the clock, skipped breaks or a burnout-level workload.”

Self-doubt and work-related stress are the two lowest scoring items in the Resilience and Equanimity dimension of the 6-element GLWS framework.

What Is New: AI As Accelerant

In co-curating our client programs, Audrey and I have compared notes on the coaching and advisory work we are supporting our clients with. We are seeing  patterns  emerge  and collide with stress responses to the macro global instability and volatility that has been mounting over several decades. We are aligned and clear on many things, namely that AI is not neutral. It is a clear accelerant for whichever pattern already exists . The research since 2024 supports our claims.

Julie Bedard and colleagues at Boston Consulting Group surveyed 1,488 full-time workers and found that the most mentally taxing form of AI use was not using it but overseeing it. Checking and verifying AI output was linked to 14% more mental effort and 19% greater information overload, a state the authors call “AI brain fry.” Where AI took routine work off people’s plates, burnout scores were 15% lower and engagement was higher. The variable is not necessarily adoption. It is what the organisation has decided AI is for.

A 2025 study by KPMG and the University of Melbourne  on 48,340 people across 47 countries found that 2 in 3 employees rely on AI output without evaluating it and more than half hide their use of AI at work. Furthermore, 1 in 5 report that AI has reduced human collaboration. A 2-wave study by Wang and Li published in Behavioural Sciences in September 2026 followed 313 employees and found that AI use predicted later burnout, not through exhaustion but through a weakened sense of professional competence. Microsoft’s own 2025 analysis of its workplace data found knowledge workers interrupted on average every 2 minutes. Its researchers warned that “we risk using AI to accelerate a broken system.”

This year’s Mental Health Month theme, Together We Thrive is fundamentally about connection. Connection is what the evidence suggests is continuously thinning as a result of a diverse set of context and challenges. When Professor Amy Edmondson spoke with the Thrive team and our clients in Sydney last November, she warned that AI risks driving us “more into loneliness rather than into connection.” A 2025 study by the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI followed 981 people over 4 weeks and found that heavier chatbot use was associated with greater loneliness, greater emotional dependence and less socialising with other people. While the researchers are careful to describe it as correlation versus causation, the pattern is still worth noticing. One of Audrey’s key observations from our client and team offsites last week was that every previous workplace technology had a stopping point built into it. AI has none, which sounds like freedom but often behaves like pressure. The boundary must come from the person and the most conscientious people find that hardest.

Not All Stress Is Workload

Part of the answer sits in understanding what the stressor actually is. Gargi Sawhney of Auburn University and Mallory McCord of Wright State University published a meta-analysis of 515 studies spanning 60 years of role stress research in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour in 2026, summarised in Harvard Business Review in September. They separate work stress into 3 things we tend to collapse into:

1. Role ambiguity related to unclear expectations and erodes job satisfaction and performance the most.
2. Role conflict related to incompatible demands, is the one that drives burnout and turnover.
3. Role overload related to volume, which shows up mostly in emotional and physical symptoms.

That has consequences for how leaders intervene. Our instinct is to reduce volume, because volume is the thing we can count. If the stressor is ambiguity, cutting the workload will not touch it. The person is then judged as not resilient enough. In 2023 we wrote about the “collaborative demands” we were witnessing with our clients overwhelmed by meetings, pre-meetings and decision socialisation requests, leaving little time for their own work and struggling to decipher what matters and where the interdependencies lie. This research gives that struggle a name and points to a different remedy: clarity about what matters most.

Work Design Is Now a Duty

What we argued as good practice in 2024 is now, in part, a legal obligation. With Victoria’s Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations commencing on 1 December 2025, every Australian jurisdiction now names Psychosocial Hazards in Work
Health and Safety law. The model Code of Practice lists “role overload” and “conflicting roles or ambiguous responsibilities and expectations” explicitly. Employers now have a duty to eliminate or minimise these risks so far as is reasonably practicable. Leaving roles unclear or overloaded is no longer only a missed opportunity, it is a compliance risk.

Professor Sharon Parker and Dr Caroline Knight at Curtin University’s Centre for Transformative Work Design published the SMART model of work design in Human Resource Management in 2024. Good work is Stimulating, offers Mastery, gives Agency, is Relational and carries Tolerable demands. Parker’s long-standing argument is that technology does not determine wellbeing or productivity outcomes on its own. The design of the work around it does. It is one of the most useful lens we can apply to ask what AI is doing to a role. Does it add stimulation, mastery, agency and connection? Or does it add oversight, ambiguity, additional hours, cognitive complexity or mental load burdens?

The Leadership Opportunity

Most organisations are asking how to do more with less. The better question Audrey put to our Thrive Advisory team last week relates to how best to redesign work around AI so that people can do less with more. For leaders that comes down to a short list.

• Decide what comes off the plate when something new goes on. Nobody self-regulates their way out of workload creep. This is particularly important at this time of year and this prior Thrive article may be of use.
• Count oversight. We measure hours and we measure output. Nobody is measuring how much of a day now goes on checking.
• Diagnose the stressor before treating it. Ambiguity, conflict and overload need different remedies.
• Look hardest at your middle layer of leaders. Managers and team leaders are holding the most strain with the least authority to fix it or raise the issues. These can be the canary in the coalmine that will signal the most important stressors, strain and support.

We will be helping leaders to grapple with the very real personal, team and organisational challenges related to Navigating the Age of AI and Supporting Sustainable Performance (for self and colleagues) through our upcoming Leading and Performing Sustainability (LPS) Cohort and Intact Team Leadership Development Programs in 2027. Please reach out to us at [email protected] ​for more information on how we could tailor an approach for your leaders or teams.

Reflection Questions

For Individuals

1. If someone asked how you are and you answered “fine”, would your calendar, your breaks and your evenings agree?
2. What has AI taken off your plate this year and what has it added? Which list is longer?
3. Where have you started treating your own judgment as less trustworthy than a tool’s?
4. Are you experiencing AI shame (the guilt of feeling like you have cheated by using AI) and/or AI proficiency shame (anxiety about being left behind without cutting-edge AI skills)? What impact is this having on you as a leader? What impact is it having on your mental health?
5. Taken from the GLWS and Thrive Advisory’s Imposter Experience Masterclasses: Do you often doubt yourself more than you should at work? What, if anything, has prompted this and what could ameliorate this wellbeing and performance detractor?
6. How do you feel about your responses to these questions? What can you do differently yourself to mitigate risks? Where do you need support from your leader and/or organisation? What, when and how will you share your requests?

For Teams

1. How would you rate the current levels of stress and burnout risk on your team?
2. Are you having honest conversations as a team about your workload, wellbeing, prioritisation and role/work design?
3. If you asked your team what the top team priority was for the quarter, how many different answers would come back?
4. In what ways is AI offering promise and peril for you as a team? What wellbeing challenges and risks are arising as a result of AI?
5. Are you having the right conversations regarding what you can control and prioritise with regards to the negative impacts of AI? In what ways could you discuss ways to mitigate these risks with your team?
6. How are you side-stepping the risk of Additive Bias at the team level? When you last rolled out an AI tool or AI-led initiative, did anyone ask what work it would remove before asking what it would add?

For Organisations

1. If you ran a wellbeing initiative this month, what was it designed to change? Did this change occur from your perspective? Would the people it was designed for give the same answer?
2. If you asked leaders across levels what the top 3 organisational priorities were for this quarter, how many different answers would come back?
3. How are you side-stepping the risk of Additive Bias at the organisational level? When you last rolled out an AI tool, did anyone ask what work it would remove before asking what it would add?
4. Does your Psychosocial Risk register name role ambiguity and role conflict or only workload? What themes are emerging from your risk registers that sit at the intersection of AI, leadership and wellbeing?
5. What are you doing to equip your leaders with the knowledge and skills (beyond technological/tool-based) to navigate the Age of AI?
6. How are you supporting your leaders with their own wellbeing and sustainable performance? How well are you equipping them to support their teams in this regard and to understand their leadership shadow related to AI and wellbeing?

If you need support for yourself or advice on how to support others, Lifeline is available 24 hours a day on 13 11 14.