What would be the consequences of a heavy workload on employees?.

I believe work overload produces less effeciency and consumes energy needed for creative thinking and output.

As long as it is manageable it would go smooth and would be enjoyed. Beyond that it has to be shared with others to keep it going.

The consequences are positive and negative.

Positively, it will throw challenges to the employee to enable him improve his speed, efficiency and skills.

Negatively, it may affect his work-life balance and lead to stress & demotivation.  

Stress, health problems, efficiency decrease for employees and create a dissatisfied working environment.  Negative publicity for the organization and may lead to industrial disputes and interference of external forces, that is really a unhealthy affair for the organization to grow and develop to difficult to attain a target beyond a particular limit.

Weakness resulting from the organization and for

sure stress for employees in the same time as well too.

The negative effects are many:

• Lower work moral
• Increased mistakes and errors.
• Higher employee cost in overtime or in fixing errors.
• Resignation if too much heavy workload is imposed.

Therefore, managers should try to get the job done without imposing heavy workload on employees as much as possible. However, it is also expected from the employees to have heavy workload when the time calls.

Low Moral hence low productivity !!

You can expect stress around the place, employees' becoming less productive, too tired, no creativity , more absenteeism rates, lack of motivation, low quality products, missing deadlines and everything companies suffer from.  Heavy workload can be tolerated for a limited amount of time for a specific project but not all the time.  And after a heavy project employees have to get appreciation notes and something like a day off, a celebration at work , a social event or anything to boost the energy and encourage employees to keep giving. 

Of course you can expect allot from a human being, but a human is a combination of body and soul that have limits. You may keep asking an employee to work harder, and he may keep giving you results, but one day he will get exhausted either by getting sick or by giving negative results such as too much errors,... . 

The stress at work and continuous pressure

Agreed with the answer of Mr. Krishna Moorthy.