diff --git a/pinot-core/src/main/java/org/apache/pinot/core/operator/combine/GroupByCombineOperator.java b/pinot-core/src/main/java/org/apache/pinot/core/operator/combine/GroupByCombineOperator.java
index aeef763ad5a1..633fb7d5e6f8 100644
--- a/pinot-core/src/main/java/org/apache/pinot/core/operator/combine/GroupByCombineOperator.java
+++ b/pinot-core/src/main/java/org/apache/pinot/core/operator/combine/GroupByCombineOperator.java
@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@
 import org.apache.pinot.core.query.aggregation.groupby.AggregationGroupByResult;
 import org.apache.pinot.core.query.aggregation.groupby.GroupKeyGenerator;
 import org.apache.pinot.core.query.request.context.QueryContext;
+import org.apache.pinot.core.query.scheduler.resources.ResourceManager;
 import org.apache.pinot.core.util.GroupByUtils;
 import org.apache.pinot.spi.trace.Tracing;
 import org.slf4j.Logger;
@@ -47,8 +48,6 @@
 
 /**
  * Combine operator for group-by queries.
- * TODO: Use CombineOperatorUtils.getNumThreadsForQuery() to get the parallelism of the query instead of using
- *       all threads
  */
 @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
 public class GroupByCombineOperator extends BaseSingleBlockCombineOperator<GroupByResultsBlock> {
@@ -80,12 +79,13 @@ public GroupByCombineOperator(List<Operator> operators, QueryContext queryContex
   }
 
   /**
-   * For group-by queries, when maxExecutionThreads is not explicitly configured, create one task per operator.
+   * For group-by queries, when maxExecutionThreads is not explicitly configured, override it to create as many tasks
+   * as the default number of query worker threads (or the number of operators / segments if that's lower).
    */
   private static QueryContext overrideMaxExecutionThreads(QueryContext queryContext, int numOperators) {
     int maxExecutionThreads = queryContext.getMaxExecutionThreads();
     if (maxExecutionThreads <= 0) {
-      queryContext.setMaxExecutionThreads(numOperators);
+      queryContext.setMaxExecutionThreads(Math.min(numOperators, ResourceManager.DEFAULT_QUERY_WORKER_THREADS));
     }
     return queryContext;
   }