In the latest issue of The Harvard Business Review, a team of researchers argue that a steady increase in collaborative work is undermining organizations' performance.

Across industries, they say, the most knowledgeable and helpful employees are barraged by requests from coworkers throughout the company until eventually they burn out and quit.

It's a sort of "success syndrome," the researchers say — the more valuable you are to the company, the more demands get placed on you.

We spoke to one of the researchers behind The Harvard Business Review article — Rob Cross, a professor of commerce at the University of Virginia — about how this process typically unfolds and what can be done to prevent it.

Cross, who's been studying the effects of collaborative networks for two decades, said he's seen a "phenomenal explosion in collaborative intensity in the last 10 years."

Part of that explosion is attributable to technological innovations like email and social media, which make it easier to connect with coworkers across the globe in real time.

But Cross also argues that a less obvious factor is the way organizations are evolving on a structural level. He noted that most Fortune 500 organizations are moving to matrix-based management and dual-reporting systems, which means that employees might be responsible to and receive assignments from at least two managers.

Moreover, Cross said that in many industries job knowledge has gotten so specialized that it becomes imperative for people in different departments to work together.

On the surface, these developments might seem like a good thing — Cross said people's immediate reaction when they hear about collaboration is that "everyone thinks we need more of it."

Even senior leaders can be blind to the downsides of collaboration, namely that their top employees are getting overloaded and are at risk for leaving. That's largely because many of the demands placed on those employees are "invisible" to everyone else.

In a 2011 paper on how collaboration contributes to employee turnover, Cross and colleagues wrote: "In our research we frequently spoke with leaders who were mystified as to why an employee's productivity had been falling off until they were able to see how relationally overloaded that employee had become."

In other words, leaders might think that their assignments and requests are the only drains on an employee's time, not realizing that that same employee is being pulled in all directions by other colleagues. So when that employee burns out — or worse, leaves the company — they can't imagine why.

Yet at the same time, no one has a problem understanding how overwhelmed they feel personally. Cross said everyone cringes at the idea of having another meeting put on their calendar because they're already so bogged down.

Cross's aim in studying collaborative networks is to "put some data around what everyone's experiencing," so that organizations can put measures in place to combat collaborative overload.

One of the most compelling data points is a graph featured in The Harvard Business Review article, based on data the authors collected from leaders across 20 organizations. According to their findings, the more colleagues who considered the person an effective source of information and the more colleagues who wanted greater access to that person, the less engaged that person was at work.

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Cross labels this phenomenon the "success syndrome" because the better you perform, the more you're expected to fulfill everyone's needs.

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