Purpose – The purpose of this article is to empirically examine the relationship between managers’ emotional exhaustion and the ethnic diversity, workload requirements, and friendship ties within their work-groups.

Design/methodology/approach – The research employs a full-network sample of all managers from an indigenously owned ethnically diverse IT firm located in the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Using a social network design within a regression model, the relationship between managerial power and operational workload and the burnout dimension of emotional exhaustion is initially examined as a baseline model. Work-group ethnicity and friendship ties are then examined as moderators to this relationship. The authors then examine the role of work-group ethnicity and friendship ties as a buffer mechanism using an efficient frontier analysis where managers act as decision-making units.

Findings – The study indicates that ethnic diversity acts more as a “negative moderator” to emotional exhaustion, while friendship ties act as both a “positive moderator” and “buffer” to work-related emotional exhaustion.

Originality/value – This is one of the few empirical studies that has examined the issues of ethnic diversity and burnout using social network and efficient frontier methodologies. This is also one of the first empirical studies to investigate these issues using an in-depth, full-sample case study of actual, real-work network relationships.