Tragedy of the (Un)commons
How star performers become overloaded, and what we can do about it
Most stars don’t die with a bang. It’s a common misconception: although the biggest stars end their life with a supernova, researchers estimate the vast majority of stars - around 97% - will end up slowly burning out, becoming “white dwarfs.”
The stargazing we do in organizational science has to do with the people that shine the brightest, rather than solar masses. But we do see the same patterns as astronomers: as Shad Morries and James Oldroyd outline in their book chapter How Information Overload Creates Significant Challenges for Star Employees, due to their high levels of social capital, star performers are also more likely to be stretched and overloaded, putting them at risk of burnout.
Because star performers frequently produce orders of magnitude more value than their peers, they are an incredible source of competitive advantage for organizations. Still, you would be hard pressed to find executive leadership who would prefer that their star performers are oversubscribed. So is this just a harsh reality, or is there something we can do to prevent it?
Star performers as common-pool resources within organizations
The star over-use problem is reminiscent of the tragedy of the commons in economics. In a landmark 1968 paper, Ecologist Garett Hardin illustrated how a natural resource such as a pasture can be destroyed through the collective, rational choices of many individuals: if everyone has open and unchecked access to the pasture, it will tend to be overused and ultimately destroyed. This concept is used to justify and explain our institutional structures (private or public, depending on the situation as we’ll see below) that allocate access to resources. The tragedy of the commons is one of the most fundamental reasons why we have property rights for some goods, and public control and provisioning of others.
The standard economic theory of goods relies on two constructs:
Rivalry: If me consuming one unit of a good prevents you from consuming it, then the good is rivalrous (binary: rivalrous or not)
Excludability: If you or I can be excluded from a good because we aren’t paying for it, then it is excludable (note – this can be viewed more as a spectrum or continuous variable)
Getting back to our stars, we can think of their time and skills (human capital) as being a rivalrous good. Quoting economist Paul Romer:
The ability to add is rivalrous because the person who possesses this ability cannot be in more than one place at the same time; nor can this person solve many problems at once.
Excludability is where things get more interesting. Of course, between organizations workers are largely free to choose and can prevent different organizations from consuming their work output, so the excludability of human capital in the labor market is quite high. However, within organizations, workers may have less freedom to say “yes” or “no” and/or they may operate in unstructured environments where there are social pressures to respond and help others. As Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant discuss in Collaboration Overload, too many demands on workers with a high amount of social capital can exhaust them and decrease performance of the overall group.
Solutions to the Tragedy of the (Un)commons
A lot has already been written on information / collaborative overload and the potential solutions, and I don’t want to re-hash it. If you’re interested, I would definitely recommend digging into links to the authors above. Instead, I want to borrow from political philosophy and explore how the tragedy of the commons is addressed at a macroeconomic level, and what we might be able to learn from it. While these solutions may not translate perfectly, the hope is it provides a loose framework for people analytics practitioners and organizational psychologists to think about potential solutions.
Solution 1: Regulate Access to Stars.
For many common-pool resources, the tragedy of the commons is addressed centrally through state permitting and taxation. A permitting scheme within an organization could be formal or informal - you could imagine a leader drawing a line in the sand for their star performer: “only these people may tap on you throughout the remainder of this project.” The downside to this option is that if a star is a star because of their high social capital, then we should be looking to address the overload problem without draining their biggest resource.
Taxation is interesting to think about in this context. The basic concept is that when we tax something, we get less of it and/or incentivize people to be more thoughtful about their consumption. For example, carbon taxes are heralded for their effectiveness despite being unpopular. As a loose analogue (technically this is more like privatization), some internal consulting teams charge billable hours to their clients within the organization. This increases transaction costs, which seemingly runs against the core purpose of companies, but the upside – better utilization of star performers and clear focus on only the top priorities – could be a worthy exception in some cases.
Solution 2: Help Stars Increase their Excludability
The decentralized approach would be to change the dynamic and help stars position themselves to be more exclusive, akin to private goods. Managers can set their stars up for success by being intentional and prescriptive about their roles in the organization: meta-analytic evidence on the predictors and consequences of burnout suggests that minimizing role conflict (incompatible work demands / being pulled in too many directions at once) and maximizing role clarity (the extent to which the role and its boundaries are clearly defined) are key variables in preventing burnout.
Job autonomy is another variable you might expect to have a large impact. At face value, it seems like offering star performers more freedom to determine how work gets done would be important for reducing star overload. However – while research on this exact question appears to be sparse – there is reason to think that more autonomy is not itself sufficient. Because of stars’ natural gravity, autonomy could be a double edged sword without some of the other critical factors such as role clarity. Similarly, some research suggests that a combination of autonomy (job crafting in this example) and high levels of support from the organization has a stronger effect on reducing burnout than either autonomy or organizational support alone.
Solution 3: Stewardship
In the tragedy of the commons, not only is a resource overused, but the lack of ownership leaves a void of responsibility for maintaining its health. Most organizations have direct manager relationships, but that is often not enough.
Establishing clear roles and incentives for other stakeholders like mentors, or the talent management team, can increase a sense of stewardship of talent - this will help take some pressure off the direct manager but will help the star as well.
Solution 4: All of the Above
For such a structural problem, a combination between centralized and decentralized tactics is probably going to be most effective. What this means in practical terms is that all parties spanning senior leadership, talent management / HR, and direct managers should be wary of star overload.
People analytics can help by providing insights to these parties collectively. In line with the evidence referenced above, measuring star performers’ perceived job demands and resources, in addition to their networks, would be a great place to start. Lastly, from a program / policy perspective, people analytics can help measure the effectiveness of any higher-level efforts to increase the exclusivity of stars.
Addendum: Human Capital as a Good (vs. a Byproduct) and an Asset (vs. Operating Expense)
While we’ve used the economics of common-pool goods as a metaphor for the dilemma facing star performers, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a metaphor. Could part of the reason for star-performer overuse be due to our view of workers as a fixed expense, rather than an asset to be sustained?
Governments are increasingly recognizing that much like open source technology, a skilled workforce is something that benefits almost everyone, and should be viewed as a public good. Within organizations, there is a growing movement to reconsider the fundamental accounting principles - which arguably incentivize organizations to mismanage their talent - and to start treating human capital as an asset.
I hope that this can spur ideas for people analytics practitioners and organizational psychologists, in that if we think of human capital as a good / asset, we open up portals to think about it in new ways. If successful, a paradigm shift in how we view human capital could lead to a plethora of innovations in how it is managed and nurtured.