Collaboration is indispensable to contemporary organizing, yet its costs are commonly framed as failures of personal prioritization, meeting discipline, or digital self-control. This article develops an original non-empirical conceptual framework that treats collaboration overload as an infrastructure problem produced by organizational defaults governing interdependence, access, meetings, communication channels, visibility, and decision authority. The framework integrates four domains: the foundations of collaborative work, meeting saturation, coordination debt and deferred individual work, and cognitive depletion across communication channels. It proposes that collaborative demands become overload when organizationally generated requests exceed the temporal, attentional, and coordinative capacity available for both joint and individual work. Meeting saturation and interruption processes may displace execution time, while unresolved dependencies may accumulate as proposed coordination debt. Channel-specific demands may further deplete cognitive resources, although these relationships remain conditional on task interdependence, role, legitimacy, timing, technology–task fit, team climate, and work arrangement. The article advances design principles that relocate responsibility from individual coping alone toward governance of defaults, participation rights, escalation paths, asynchronous alternatives, and protected execution capacity. It also specifies propositions, measurement requirements, rival explanations, and falsification conditions for future research. The framework is not presented as a validated causal model or universal prescription. Its contribution is an integrative architecture that distinguishes collaboration quantity from coordination quality, visibility from performance, autonomy from transferred responsibility, and conceptual plausibility from organizational decision readiness.
