Why You Cannot Just Set Boundaries at Work

The advice is everywhere. Set boundaries. Communicate your limits. Say no to what does not serve you. Protect your energy.

This advice is correct in the abstract and frequently useless in practice. Not because the principle is wrong but because it ignores the power dynamics of the employment relationship and what actually happens to most workers who try to enforce limits in environments not designed to receive them.

What the Advice Assumes

Boundary-setting advice assumes a negotiation between two parties with roughly equivalent power. Party A requests something. Party B evaluates the request against their own interests and limits. Party B communicates their limit clearly and respectfully. Party A accepts the limit and adjusts their expectations.

This is not what most employment relationships look like. The employment relationship is structurally asymmetric. Your employer needs a role filled. You need this specific income, in this specific location, with this specific set of benefits, often with colleagues and work you have invested in. The employer can find another person for the role more easily than you can find an equivalent role elsewhere. This asymmetry is the background condition for every interaction you have about expectations and limits at work.

What Actually Happens When You Set a Boundary

When a worker communicates a limit in a workplace not structured to receive it, several things can happen. The limit is accepted and respected. The limit is accepted verbally and then tested repeatedly until it is abandoned. The limit is noted and the worker is quietly deprioritised for opportunities that require the kind of commitment the limit signals they will not give. The limit is accepted but the worker is gradually excluded from the informal networks where the real work happens.

The first outcome is real and exists in good organisations. The other outcomes are also real and exist in most organisations. The advice to set boundaries rarely acknowledges that the likely outcome depends entirely on the organisation you are in and your position within it, and that in many organisations the cost of enforcement is borne entirely by the person setting the boundary.

Who Can Actually Set Boundaries

The ability to enforce limits at work is almost entirely a function of power. The person who is genuinely hard to replace, who has skills the organisation cannot easily source elsewhere, who has an external reputation that gives them options, can set and enforce limits because the cost to the organisation of losing them outweighs the cost of accepting the limit.

The person without these advantages is in a different position. They can communicate their limits. The organisation will weigh the cost of accommodating the limit against the cost of replacing them. If replacement is cheap and easy, the limit will be accommodated only for as long as it is convenient to do so.

This does not mean limits are never worth communicating. It means the conversation about limits has to be preceded by an honest assessment of what power you actually have and what enforcement of the limit will realistically cost you. Most boundary-setting advice skips this step because it is uncomfortable and because it reveals that the advice is most useful to people who least need it.

The Structural Fix Is Not Personal

The conditions under which workers can genuinely set and maintain limits are structural: labour markets that give workers real options, legal protections that make retaliation costly, cultural norms that do not reward overwork and penalise self-protection, and management practices that measure output rather than hours and availability.

Where these conditions exist, boundary-setting works. Where they do not, it works for the powerful and costs the rest.

The individualised advice to set better limits is not wrong. It is incomplete. It addresses the symptom available to individual action while leaving the cause, the power asymmetry that makes the symptom necessary, entirely untouched. That is the advice's limitation. It is also why it is the advice most organisations are comfortable repeating.

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Further reading:

• why quiet quitting emerges when boundaries fail
• the burnout that follows when you cannot