Cutting the pointless work isn't the end of the strain. The change itself is what people have to absorb.

You have just signed off on dropping a weekly report that nobody reads and an approval step that added three days to every purchase. You expect your team to feel lighter by Friday. Some of them may feel the opposite.

That is the uncomfortable suggestion in a paper by Annika Schaefer and Kai C. Bormann, both listed at Bielefeld University, titled The less the better? The effects of changes in illegitimate tasks on exhaustion and uncertainty. It appeared online in Work & Stress in January 2026, and Bielefeld issued a press release about it on October 7. The paper is not new; the release is the news hook, and I am using both.

The paper's term is illegitimate tasks: work an employee perceives as unnecessary or unreasonable. The abstract says earlier research has tied these tasks firmly to emotional exhaustion but mostly treated them as a fixed condition. This paper asks what happens when the amount changes, compared with a level that stays constant.

The method, per the abstract, is two studies using experience sampling — one daily, one weekly — meaning employees were surveyed repeatedly over time. That makes this self-reported survey evidence from two studies, not a controlled experiment. The release describes the same design and does not give sample sizes, and neither does the abstract. I could not get past the publisher's paywall, so everything here rests on the published abstract, as indexed by OpenAlex, and the Bielefeld release. I cannot tell you how many people took part or how large the effects were.

The abstract's central sentence:

Our results indicate that, compared to constant levels, changes in illegitimate tasks – even decreases – lead to increases in emotional exhaustion.Schaefer and Bormann, Work & Stress, abstract as indexed by OpenAlex

The abstract also reports that uncertainty mediates the relationship between illegitimate tasks and exhaustion, and the release says the researchers suggest uncertainty as an explanation: a change makes it harder to know what will be expected next. Drawing on a cognitive resource perspective, the authors assume earlier experiences act as reference points for how people read current tasks. The abstract does not say, and I could not check, whether the uncertainty pathway was equally strong for decreases as for increases.

Here is why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. You usually see a change as a conclusion: the problem was identified, the fix is decided. Your people receive it as the first they hear of it, with none of the context that made the decision obvious to you. They do not know whether the cut is permanent, whether a different demand is replacing it, or what it says about how their work was being judged. You hold the information that would remove the uncertainty, and you are the only person who can supply it. Nobody below you can explain a decision they did not make.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: this is not an argument for leaving pointless work in place. The comparison in the paper is against a stable level of such tasks, and I would not read it as a case for keeping the status quo. My inference is that the way a reduction is delivered probably matters as much as the reduction, because the paper points at uncertainty, and uncertainty is something a clear explanation can address. That is my reasoning, not a tested result. Whether explanation actually prevents the exhaustion is not something I could confirm from what I read; the release reports the researchers' practical advice that managers explain changes to tasks, not just make them.

Other cautions are mine, not the authors'. Self-report can reflect mood on the day. Two studies are not a settled finding. And exhaustion rising after a change may partly reflect the work of adjusting, which may pass; the abstract mentions long-term effects such as burnout as a concern but I did not see data on how long the effect lasts.

One thing to do this week. Before the next task change goes out, write down three sentences and say them aloud to the people affected: what is stopping or starting, what is not changing, and when you will tell them if that picture shifts. Then ask each person what they now expect to be asked for. Their answers tell you where the uncertainty is.

Leaders are the ones who decide to change the work and the ones who most often forget to explain it. The Leadership Profile on the Wiring Map is built to show where that gap sits in how you run the place.