Why teams overwork—and how leaders can fix it

The people aren’t broken. The system is. That’s the clearest takeaway from new organizational research studying overwork among high-performing teams. It’s not that team members lack boundaries. It’s that the structures around them reward invisible labor, conflate effort with value, and confuse collaborative agility with blurred accountability. Even in founder-led startups with “flat culture” and high trust, chronic overwork doesn’t just creep in—it gets encoded.

From Singapore to the UAE, where founder centrality is common and job roles often stretch beyond formal scope, early-stage teams are especially vulnerable. And the more ambitious the vision, the easier it is for structural fragility to masquerade as heroic commitment. But what if overwork isn’t a character flaw—or even a cultural inevitability? What if it’s a solvable system design failure?

When you walk into a startup of ten, you’ll often hear a version of this: “We’re all owners here. We roll up our sleeves and do what’s needed.” But when you look closer, you’ll see something else: one product manager doing support tickets at night, a junior engineer stress-refreshing Slack to catch bugs early, and a marketing lead sitting in on finance calls “just in case.” What looks like hustle is often structural leakage.

Without a mapped system of ownership and responsibility, team members pick up work based on perceived need—not actual priority or role alignment. That’s where the osmosis begins. A missed task becomes everyone’s job. A vague outcome becomes a team default. And soon, initiative mutates into exhaustion. This happens because startup teams often skip role clarity in favor of speed. But clarity isn’t a blocker. It’s a throughput enabler.

Early teams thrive on proximity. Founders are accessible, feedback is fast, and roles flex based on what's urgent. But without redesigning that dynamic as the team scales, founder behavior becomes both the model and the bottleneck. When the founder is the default decision-maker, the team unconsciously aligns its pace and effort to the founder’s availability and mood. If a founder stays up late solving customer pain points, the team mimics that pattern. Not because they’re asked to—but because they don’t want to disappoint.

In Singapore and Gulf-based teams, where indirect communication and hierarchy respect are culturally ingrained, this dynamic gets magnified. Teams won’t say “I’m overwhelmed.” They’ll signal it by pulling back, ghosting non-urgent tasks, or quietly disengaging. This isn’t laziness. It’s emotional overload from constant signal-scanning without structural clarity.

The cost of overwork isn’t just fatigue. It’s mistrust. When some team members consistently over-function—taking on more, responding faster, covering gaps—others begin to feel either invisible or guilty. They question whether they’re doing enough. Or they check out, believing the system rewards volume over value. Velocity suffers too. Overworked teams create parallel workflows: redoing tasks just to be sure, double-checking assumptions, and looping in extra people to “align.” These behaviors might feel collaborative, but they dilute ownership and slow delivery.

Worst of all, retention risk spikes. High performers either burn out or leave because their standards aren’t matched. Steady contributors begin to wonder if their quiet consistency is undervalued. And new joiners get confused: “Is this the expected pace… or just survival?” Left unchecked, overwork becomes the unspoken price of belonging.

A 2024 study by INSEAD and Wharton researchers found that overwork patterns were most acute in teams with “diffuse accountability and founder over-presence.” The problem wasn’t team motivation—it was missing delegation infrastructure.

Key findings include:

• Teams with weekly owner reviews (not just project updates) reported 28% lower stress levels and 19% higher task completion confidence.
• Psychological safety increased when roles had both “decision authority” and “escalation clarity.”
• Founders who documented and publicly handed off ownership during scaling phases saw reduced attrition, even with rising workload.

These aren’t just HR insights. They’re operational truths.

To redesign away from accidental overwork, founders and team leads need more than culture slides. They need visible structure.

Here’s a 3-part system any early team can use:

1. The Ownership Map

Build a cross-functional view of core work areas—think customer onboarding, technical incidents, campaign planning, product roadmap, hiring pipeline. For each, assign one accountable owner. Not someone who contributes—someone who decides and delivers. Ownership isn’t task execution. It’s authority plus responsibility. It also comes with the right to say no.

2. The Rule of Three

No more than three people should own or touch any deliverable at the same time. More than that? It’s not clarity—it’s crowding. Use this rule to audit team rituals, async updates, and project assignments.

3. Escalation as Design

Create clear, pre-agreed escalation paths. For example: if a product bug affects more than 10 customers, the engineer pings the PM and founder. If hiring stalls for more than 3 weeks, HR escalates to the COO. Escalation shouldn’t be emotional—it should be procedural. These three tools sound simple. But together, they rewire how effort gets distributed and how safety is built.

Many founders think their teams overwork out of loyalty. But in interviews conducted across Southeast Asian seed-stage startups, team members revealed a different reason: fear of being the weakest link.

“When something drops, I don’t know who’s really supposed to catch it—so I do,” one marketing lead said. “I’d rather stay up than risk being blamed.” This behavior isn’t just unsustainable. It signals a failure of psychological safety. If your team doesn’t know what not to do, you haven’t designed true ownership. You’ve just handed out heroic pressure.

To fix this, founders need to normalize offloading. During retros, ask: “What did you carry that wasn’t yours?” Or better: “What didn’t get done—and was that okay?” Overwork breaks when safety grows louder than performance anxiety.

In Western startup culture, overwork is often discussed through the lens of hustle and grind. But in Southeast Asia and the Gulf, overwork is more likely to stem from role ambiguity, collective guilt, and power deference. That’s why borrowed rituals—like 15-minute standups, OKRs, or Slack check-ins—often fail to address root cause. They track output. They don’t repair structure.

Leaders must localize their team systems:

• In Gulf incubators, assign visible "handoff ceremonies" when ownership transfers. It reduces ambiguity in hierarchical cultures.
• In Singapore, explicitly document scope boundaries during growth phases. Avoid vague phrases like “wear many hats” that overextend quieter team members.
• In hybrid or remote teams across Asia, reinforce asynchronous clarity. If the team can’t make a decision without waiting for a Slack reply at 11pm, that’s not dedication—it’s design debt.

Local context isn’t a barrier. It’s a multiplier—when systemized with care.

If you're a founder or team lead, try answering these questions without checking any doc:

1. Who owns onboarding quality today? What happens if they take two weeks off?
2. What’s your team’s shared definition of “done” for major deliverables?
3. When something gets dropped, who decides whether it gets picked up—or left?
4. In your last sprint, how many team members worked late without it being urgent?

If you’re hesitating or unsure, the overwork risk already exists. These aren’t trust issues. They’re system clarity gaps.

Overwork doesn’t start with burnout. It starts with identity. In early-stage teams, everyone wants to matter. And when systems are light, the fastest way to signal value is to always be “on.” Founders reward responsiveness, not just results. Team members confuse visibility with security. And culture slides celebrate effort without anchoring expectations.

But what feels like team spirit in Month 3 becomes unsustainable in Month 12. Delivery slows. Health suffers. And when the company finally matures into growth mode, the team is already too brittle to scale.

Design clarity is a maturity signal. Not an afterthought.

Culture doesn’t live in your onboarding doc. It lives in who gets praised, who gets left out, and how work flows under pressure. If your team works late, skips boundaries, or quietly absorbs ambiguity—it’s not their fault. It’s your design. Fix the design, and the overwork stops feeling like a badge of honor.

Start with this:
If you disappeared for two weeks, would the team trust the system more than they miss your presence? If the answer is no—it’s time to redesign what trust really looks like. Because clarity scales. Overwork doesn’t.