Engaged employees provide organizations with a valuable competitive advantage. Research consistently shows that they are more productive and much less likely to leave than less engaged colleagues. This is why organizations invest so much in building an engaged workforce.
But what if these investments are being silently undermined by a common, well-intentioned management habit?
Also read:
Continues after advertising
Our new research identifies a hidden cost that silently erodes engagement gains from the inside out — and it starts with a deceptively simple question: When unexpected work lands on a manager’s desk, who does he ask to do it?
We found that the most motivated employees are being systematically overloaded with extra tasks—much more than their less motivated colleagues. And this is making them like their jobs less.
A better way to distribute tasks
However, there is a better way to distribute tasks.
We have developed and tested three low-cost interventions that you can apply with your managers to significantly reduce this pattern of overload:
- Track the distribution of tasks.
Leaders should encourage managers to keep a simple record of who gets additional work, such as a spreadsheet, a running list, or brief notes after each decision.
The goal is to make managers aware of their own biases. Most managers in our studies had no idea they were distributing work so unevenly.
Continues after advertising
2. Group assignment decisions.
In one study, we found that managers who assigned multiple tasks at once, rather than making isolated, one-off decisions, were much more likely to distribute work equitably.
Whenever possible, encourage your managers to group attribution decisions: can they be made quarterly or monthly? This simple action can make distribution naturally fairer.
Continues after advertising
3. Update beliefs about burnout.
Even employees who love their jobs have limits. Loving work does not create immunity to burnout, especially when additional tasks are not considered rewarding.
In our research, simply informing managers that intrinsic motivation does not protect employees from burnout led to more equitable distribution decisions.
Continues after advertising
None of these interventions require expensive programs or major change initiatives. They improve results for intrinsically motivated employees without compromising team performance or the satisfaction of others.
It is worth noting that our studies assume that additional tasks increase employees’ workload in ways that they did not choose and do not find rewarding.
However, if intrinsically motivated employees view certain tasks as development opportunities (such as leading a new initiative or training new hires), the negative effects we document may be reduced.
Continues after advertising
For this reason, you can also guide your managers to evaluate whether some extra tasks can be used as growth opportunities and present them that way, while still making decisions that are fair to everyone.
+++
Organizations encourage employees to express what they find meaningful about their work. But if managers use this information to disproportionately assign more work to engaged employees, the very engagement you are investing in begins to erode.
For senior leaders, these findings identify a common problem that can be easily fixed to protect engagement, strengthen retention, and sustain performance.
Overworked employees are the engaged employees who find genuine value in their work — the ones you’ve worked hardest to recruit and retain.
The solution is not to stop valuing intrinsic motivation. It’s about stopping overly relying on it as a criterion for distributing additional work and empowering managers across the organization with the awareness and tools to distribute work more fairly. This is a small intervention that protects a much larger investment.
c.2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distribuído por New York Times Licensing
