Always-on organizations extend work through overlapping communication channels, rapid-response expectations, temporal dispersion, and porous boundaries between work and nonwork. Although burnout is commonly measured as an individual condition, its antecedents and persistence may be organized through work systems that repeatedly generate demands while constraining recovery. This Original Conceptual Framework Article proposes the Systemic-Depletion Framework to connect four domains that are often examined separately: demand accumulation across work channels, recovery failure, resource-loss and social-transmission processes, and collective burnout dynamics. Systemic depletion is defined as a proposed recursive condition in which organizationally produced demands accumulate faster than individual and collective capacities can be restored. The framework distinguishes technological availability from organizational enactment, formal flexibility from substantive autonomy, individual exhaustion from collective emergence, and conceptual plausibility from empirical validation. It proposes that channel concurrency, response-time norms, temporal dispersion, and interruption patterns may intensify switching and boundary permeability; repeated recovery obstruction may then impair self-regulation and reciprocal support; and shared exposure, network relations, and team processes may stabilize collective patterns. Enabling pathways are also retained because voluntary connectivity can provide autonomy, social capital, or coordination benefits. The framework therefore directs attention toward system indicators and organizational responsibilities rather than employee-deficit explanations alone. It is not a validated causal model, diagnostic instrument, or universal intervention prescription. Testing requires intensive longitudinal, multilevel, network, and intervention designs capable of separating selection, shared exposure, reverse causation, and contextual variation.
