The Gap Between Responsibility and Authority Is Where Leaders Burn Out

If you're a middle manager right now, here's what you already know: you're responsible for everything, but you have the authority to change almost nothing.

You're accountable for your team's performance, but you can't approve their budget requests. You're expected to retain top talent, but compensation decisions happen three levels above you. You're tasked with executing the strategy, but no one asked for your input when that strategy was created.

This is the responsibility-authority gap, and it's burning leaders out at record rates. Recent data shows that managers are 36% more likely to report feeling burned out than their direct reports, and 71% of middle managers report feeling overwhelmed and stressed all the time.

The numbers tell a clear story: the problem isn't just workload. It's the structural mismatch between what leaders are held accountable for and what they actually have the power to control.

The Real Cost of Unclear Decision Rights

Here's what happens when responsibility and authority don't align: decisions get delayed, trust erodes, and performance suffers.

Research shows that ambiguity surrounding who is responsible for making a decision is a primary cause of delay in the decision-making process. When leaders don't know who has final say, decisions bounce between levels, touch multiple approval points, and sit in limbo while everyone waits for clarity that never comes.

Organizations struggle with murky decision rights that not only waste leaders' time but also undermine confidence in whatever decision is finally reached. When your team doesn't know whether you can actually approve something, they stop bringing you problems. When senior leadership keeps overriding your calls, your credibility disappears.

The gap doesn't just slow things down—it destroys morale. A recent study shows that managers' mental health is at risk due to their position of authority without strategic power. Leaders are expected to deliver results, manage performance, and drive outcomes, but they're operating without the decision-making authority required to do any of it effectively.

Why This Gap Exists (And Why It Persists)

Most organizations don't create this gap on purpose. It emerges over time as companies grow, layers multiply, and decision-making processes become more complex.

Today's organizational complexity and rapid-fire digital communications have created considerably more ambiguity about decision-making authority than was prevalent decades ago. Roles that once had clear boundaries now overlap. Matrix structures mean leaders report to multiple people with competing priorities. And hybrid work has blurred the lines even further—leaders are expected to be available around the clock, making decisions in real time without clear authority to do so.

In flat organizations, middle managers may lack formal authority to direct their teams' actions, yet they're still held accountable for results. The thinking goes: we've eliminated hierarchy, so everyone's empowered. But empowerment without authority is just responsibility with no ability to execute.

The Burnout Equation

When responsibility and authority don't match, leaders end up in a chronic state of stress. They're accountable for outcomes they can't directly influence. They're held responsible for decisions they didn't make and sometimes didn't even know about.

Middle managers often have limited authority, yet they are held accountable for achieving results, which creates a feeling of being trapped between conflicting demands. Add to that the expectation to "manage up" while protecting your team from unrealistic demands, and you've built a perfect burnout machine.

The data backs this up. In another survey, 33% of employees reported experiencing burnout, but managers reported burnout at a much higher rate—53%. The gap between those two numbers? That's the cost of responsibility without authority.

What Actually Fixes This

Closing the responsibility-authority gap requires more than feel-good initiatives or surface-level changes. It requires structural clarity.

Define decision rights explicitly. Organizations need to be clear about who owns what decisions. Not "who should be consulted" or "who has input," but who has final authority and accountability. Frameworks like OVIS (Own, Veto, Influence, Support) help establish transparent decision rights, resulting in faster decision-making speed and helping organizations meet their strategic objectives.

Push authority down to where the information lives. Decision rights must be co-located with the relevant information, and raising the level of decision-making authority requires transferring information upward as well. If a leader is closest to the customer, the data, or the problem, give them the authority to act on it. Otherwise, you're just creating bottlenecks.

Avoid overlap and ambiguity. Doubling up decision responsibility across management levels or dimensions of the reporting matrix only leads to confusion and stalemates. When multiple people think they have authority over the same decision, no one actually does.

Be explicit about escalation paths. Leaders need to know when they can decide and when they need to escalate. Set thresholds for decisions that require approval and lay out a specific protocol for the rare occasion when a decision must be kicked up the ladder. This keeps things moving and prevents decision paralysis.

Ask Yourself

If you're leading a team or managing other leaders, take a hard look at the reality they're operating in:

• Can your managers make the decisions they're accountable for, or are they constantly waiting for approval?

• Do they know exactly where their authority starts and stops, or is it ambiguous?

• Are they stuck managing expectations from above and execution from below without the power to bridge the two?

Companies that empower cross-functional teams with clear decision rights outperform their command-and-control counterparts on net profit margin, revenue growth, and revenues from new offerings. This isn't theory—it's measurable.

Burnout isn't inevitable. But if your organization expects leaders to be responsible for outcomes without giving them the authority to make the decisions that drive those outcomes, you're not building a leadership pipeline. You're building a burnout pipeline.

Fix the structure. Clarify the decision rights. Give people the authority that matches their responsibility. That's how you keep leaders from burning out—and how you build an organization that actually works.