Role clarity is the strongest burnout predictor that organisations directly control (European researchers)
Noe, Wild, Mol and Guseva Canu surveyed 4,026 junior and senior European researchers and explained about half the variation in burnout. Resilience ranked first, then role clarity, then work–family conflict, then work stress, though the authors note that resilience overlaps with burnout itself. “Illegitimate tasks”, work that falls outside your role, weighed more heavily on senior staff. The authors conclude that structural fixes such as clearer roles and sustainable workloads look more promising than individual coping programmes. The design is cross-sectional, so it does not prove cause.
If you are running low, fixing an unclear role may help more than another resilience course. Get explicit agreement on what you own and what success looks like, and push back on tasks that are not part of your job before they pile up. For organisations, poor role design shows up as individual burnout.
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