You haven’t even finished your coffee when the notifications start rolling in - slack pings, calendar invites, a teammate popping by for a quick question. Meanwhile, your inbox keeps growing, and every new message feels like it’s pulling you in a different direction.

Modern workplaces thrive on collaboration, but that collaboration comes at a hidden cost: relational overload. As teams become increasingly interconnected, employees aren’t just juggling tasks – they’re juggling people. Who needs a response right now? Which meetings matter the most? And how do you meet everyone’s expectations when you can’t do everything at once? 

New research from Gies College of Business professor Pranav Gupta suggests that solving this problem isn’t as simple as learning better time management. Instead, it requires rethinking how we design collaboration in the first place - ensuring that constant availability doesn’t become a constant drain on our collective attention.

The Collaboration Paradox

In the not-too-distant past, workplaces had built-in ways to manage attention: a clear chain of command, distinct office spaces, and even a door you could close to block out distractions. Today’s digital tools have erased those boundaries, making collaboration easier, but focus harder.   

For Gupta, an associate professor of business administration at Gies, that tension between the promise of openness and the reality of feeling overwhelmed is at the heart of his research.

"I want to answer the question, ‘How do you design the social architecture so that we are maximizing the potential that each individual has in that group,’” Gupta said, “while aligning it to maximize the potential that we have as a group together?”

”You can mute a chat, but you can’t mute a colleague’s expectations”

But what makes relationships different from information?

We all know the relentless flood of news updates, emails, Slack messages, and unread reports – the classic “information overload.” But relational overload is trickier to manage. You can mute a chat, but you can’t mute a colleague’s expectations.

According to Gupta and his colleagues in “Collective Attention and Relational Overload: A Theory of Transactive Control in High-Permeability Intraorganizational Environments,” published in Research in Organizational Behavior, the real challenge isn’t about limiting collaboration or simply improving personal time management. Employees today aren’t just connected –they’re juggling requests and trying to figure out which ones matter most. 

"For example, I have a five-year-old son. If we agree in the morning to build a Lego spaceship after work, but I later prioritize a meeting instead, he’ll be disappointed,” said Gupta. “That’s a downstream consequence. If I skip a high-priority task on a to-do list, the task doesn’t have feelings about it—but my son does. Repeatedly failing to honor commitments changes the nature of a relationship. Now, apply that to work: when we treat professional relationships like task lists, we risk losing the trust and value that drive real productivity."

When every coworker is a click away, the social and physical boundaries that once filtered out distractions – office doors, departmental walls, even time zones – start to fade. The result? A new kind of attention tax, as people struggle to decide which relationships deserve priority.

 [Society has] clubbed the two overloads and said that the strategies that work for information overload are also applied to the social world,” said Gupta. “We risk losing the potential to act intelligently, both at the individual level, where we maximize our potential by leveraging each other, as well as the at the collective level. We could be coordinating in a way that is good for us as a team.”

Rethinking How Organizations Manage Attention

Gupta’s research doesn’t just diagnose the problem – it offers a new way forward. He and his coauthors call it transactive control, an approach that organizes attention more flexibly, rather than relying on rigid policies or top-down mandates. Instead of forcing people to be “always on” or to disconnect entirely, transactive control helps direct attention to the right people at the right times, preventing overload while preserving real engagement.

Ultimately, organizations don’t have to choose between 24/7 availability and total lockdown. The right systems can do more than protect individual focus, they can create a framework for intentional collaboration.

Strategies for Managing Relational Overload

For Gupta, addressing relational overload requires more than just individual time management. It demands structural solutions that help teams balance competing demands on focus. At the heart of transactive control are three key strategies that help organizations turn overwhelm into structured, sustainable collaboration:

1. Mutually Transparent Availability. Employees need a clear sense of one another’s schedules and bandwidth, so they know when collaboration is welcome and when deep work needs protection. Small tweaks – like sharing calendars and/or giving coworkers a heads-up about different time zones – can spare everyone the stress of a repetitive back-and-forth. Shared calendars and scheduling tools don’t just cut down on logistics; they reduce the invisible tax on attention by eliminating unnecessary requests for availability.
2. Coordination of Synchrony. Real-time collaboration should be intentional, with team members aligning on the same project at the same time for maximum impact. Gupta calls this protecting “spurts of joint attention” – ensuring that when people engage synchronously, they are fully present and making the best use of their time. Once that alignment is set, individuals can step away for deep, independent work – then reconnect when new updates or collective decisions are needed. Organizations that struggle with coordinating synchrony risk undermining productivity as employees spend unnecessary time in unstructured meetings or course-correcting after a miscommunication.
3. Shared Norms of Reciprocity. Establishing clear expectations for response times and “quiet hours” helps preserve trust and prevents unchecked demands on anyone’s individual attention. Even a quick message like “I’ll follow up in a day” can head off misunderstandings and keep relationships running smoothly. Gupta likens this to hygiene – just as hand washing prevents infection, small intentional behaviors can prevent relational dysfunction in the workplace. Treating reciprocity as a shared responsibility leads to a culture of respect that balances responsiveness with the need for focus.

Teams that structure attention well don’t just reduce overload – they create workplaces where collaboration fuels productivity instead of derailing it.

“Companies can start by embedding transparency, reciprocity, and synchrony into their culture,” said Gupta. “These are simple things managers can do…that set the [organizational] culture going. And if you can add technology that can make it more efficient, all the better.”

Designing for Attention

Effective organizations don’t just demand attention, they design for it. Transactive control offers a new model for smarter collaboration, ensuring that communication doesn’t just happen, but that it happens well.

Gupta’s research at Gies is part of a larger effort to rethink how modern organizations function. His work takes the abstract concepts of collective intelligence and attentional control and makes them tangible, giving leaders concrete ways to support smarter, more intentional teams.

“It’s like a doctor diagnosing an issue,” said Gupta. “Rather than just saying ‘your heart rate is low, you should run’,we ask why it’s low. Let’s resolve that issue there.”

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Read the full study, “Collective Attention and Relational Overload: A theory of transactive control in high-permeability intraorganizational environments,” by Ethan S. Bernstein, Pranav Gupta, Mark Mortensen, and Paul M. Leonardi, in Research in Organizational Behavior. To learn more about Gupta’s research, visit his profile. Explore more research from Gies at Illinois Experts.