MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How ChatGPT Can and Can't Help Managers Design Better Job Roles

Today’s leaders are pushing to increase employee engagement and decrease turnover but face a harsh reality: widespread employee burnout. To fight it, managers need to offer employees more healthy and meaningful work. In surveys conducted in the United States by Gallup in 2022, 40% of employees reported that their job had a negative impact on their mental health, and around 30% said they frequently experience burnout. Moreover, U.S. employee engagement hit a seven-year low, with only 32% of workers polled by Gallup saying they were engaged and 17% saying they were actively disengaged in 2022. Globally, employees’ lack of engagement has been estimated to cost employers $7.8 trillion — equivalent to 11% of the global gross domestic product.

The root causes of disengagement and work stress often lie in how an organization has designed people’s jobs. Decades of extensive research consistently link poor work design with negative employee outcomes, including mental strain, high turnover, job dissatisfaction, decreased productivity, and impaired learning. Many companies are now striving to do better.

About the Author

Fangfang Zhang, Ph.D., is a research fellow at the Centre for Transformative Work Design at Curtin University. She is also a CEPAR (Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research) research fellow. Her research interests include work design, job crafting, future of work, overqualification, and aging. Sharon K. Parker is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor at Curtin University, an Australian Research Council laureate fellow, and director of the Centre for Transformative Work Design. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Science and the Society for Industrial and Organisational Psychology. She is the creator of the SMART model and cofounder of the Thrive at Work initiative.

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