Role Ambiguity: The Number 1 Stressor on Your Floor
The most damaging thing a leader can do isn't pile on work. It's making people guess.
I was once in a role where I was a middle manager of about 80 people. Basically my job was to keep everyone happy. Happy people do good work and that rubs off on customers and that results in more sales. I know that's simple, but at a high level that's what I think about.
There was a ton of work to do. New initiatives coming down from head office every week. Over 80 emails on do this, do that every day. I am not kidding! It was a mountain of work and I was pretty organised because I would turn those emails into actions, prioritise the important ones and get at least one of those done per day. 5 per week. I would include my direct reports in this process, get their input and then we would implement. Everyone had one action to do this week. 5 actions per week, 250 per year.
Even though there was a lot of work, things got done. I focused on my 4 direct reports and made sure we were all aligned and happy. They were happy and aligned.
Then my boss would get involved. Even though we went through my actions every week, which my boss didn't like, go figure, they would talk to my direct reports and their direct reports and give directions contrary to what me and my direct reports had told them.
You can imagine how that turned out. People with different skill sets moved around randomly, with no training. Everyone was confused, worried and angry.
We started to wonder where our manager/boss had taken leadership training.
The ultimate result was I got fired along with 3 of my 4 direct reports. The 4th was ill and couldn't be fired.
That move sent shock waves through the entire team. Everyone was afraid for their jobs. Sales fell, customer satisfaction fell, employee satisfaction fell.
So you might be wondering why this occurred? Me too! However it's a common story among large corporations. Troublesome manager gets promoted up the ranks and no one wants to get rid of them.
If you run a shop, you've seen the smaller version: the owner walks past the ops manager and redirects the crew mid-shift. Same ambiguity, same damage.
This ambiguity of roles and tasks is the most damaging leadership trait according to research I reference below.
Actually, that boss created two stressors at once: role conflict — directions from two chains of command that didn't line up — and role ambiguity — a team left guessing what their jobs even were. The research says conflict is what burns people out and drives them to quit. Ambiguity is what quietly kills the work itself.
There is actually a study that validates this, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Here is a quick summary of the study's findings.
Researchers pooled 515 studies covering 787,959 workers — 60 years of data, 1964 through 2024 — on the three classic role stressors: role ambiguity (you don't have the information you need to do the job or know how you're judged), role conflict (demands that contradict each other), and role overload (more work than time allows).
Role ambiguity was the most damaging of the three. It was the dominant driver for 7 of the 14 outcomes studied — including 80.7% of the explained variance in task performance and 86% in discretionary effort, the "going above and beyond" behavior that quietly disappears first.
The mechanism: when people can't tell what deserves their attention or how they're evaluated, the link between effort and outcome breaks — and motivation, confidence, and fairness perceptions erode with it.
And the strongest antidote in the whole dataset? Feedback. The worst stressor has the cheapest cure: clarity costs leadership attention, not headcount.
— Sawhney et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior (2026)
So the question is, how do you make sure you are not the boss in this story?
Number one, don't do any of the above!
Talk to your team to agree on the performance leading and lagging indicators you want to achieve. Not by asserting your authority with no focus or meaning.
Getting the team's feedback and agreement on the metric makes it easy to hold them accountable, because you are holding them accountable for what they want. For what they told you to hold them accountable for.
Another tool I like to use is Molly Graham's "Waterline Model". Don't blame poor performance on bad people. It's usually structure. [Molly Graham, Mar 04, 2026 — read the full article on Lenny's Newsletter, and check out her Substack and LinkedIn]
In a nutshell here are the Waterline Model's steps:
You have to identify the source of what's disrupting the team — not just the symptoms — and fix it quickly. In my language you look at leading not lagging behaviours.
Always start at the top. Then follow the steps below sequentially.
- Structure — you need to know that structure isn't causing your frustration.
- Dynamics — how the team works together day-to-day.
- Interpersonal — tension between two people, lack of trust, unresolved conflict, style clashes.
- Individual — what's happening inside a single person: skill gaps, stress, confidence, values, life stuff.
Follow this and it should prevent you from cycling through people unnecessarily. Like firing me.
You can read it in detail with the links from above.
Sixty years of data says your people can survive the workload. What they can't survive is guessing.
One next step: Ask your key leaders what they think the structure of the company is. Sit back, listen and then fix the ambiguity.
Further reading:
- Scaling People — Claire Hughes Johnson (Stripe Press, 2023). Role definitions and operating cadences — the structural cure for ambiguity.
- "How to Debug a Team: The Waterline Model" — Molly Graham (Lessons on Substack, 2026). Debugging a team where expectations live underwater.
- "Six Rules for Designing Company Goals" — Molly Graham (Lessons on Substack, 2026). Clear goals as the antidote to say-one-thing-change-it-at-the-door.