The enthusiasm penalty: Why motivated employees get overburdened
Managers say they value employees who genuinely enjoy their work, but new research from Cornell SC Johnson College of Business suggests that enthusiasm may come with an unexpected downside.
Kaitlin Woolley, professor of marketing at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and coauthor Sangah Bae, assistant professor at Northeastern University, conducted several studies that show employees perceived as highly intrinsically motivated are consistently assigned additional tasks, even when those tasks fall outside their job description, offer little reward or risk draining their energy.
The paper “Managers Allocate Additional Tasks to Intrinsically Motivated Employees: Exploring Mechanisms, Consequences, and Solutions” published March 11 in Organization Science.
Across five main studies and multiple supplemental investigations, Woolley and Bae found that managers routinely choose the more intrinsically motivated employee for extra work even when doing so harms employee performance, well‑being, fairness perceptions and bonuses earned. The pattern held across lab experiments, field surveys of managers and employees, and multiday decision simulations.
“Our research was conducted with hundreds of managers across industries and reveals a strikingly robust trend,” Woolley said. “A field survey revealed 76 percent of managers report allocating additional tasks at least monthly. When asked to choose between two employees, managers in our studies selected the one they viewed as more intrinsically motivated far more often than chance would predict.”
In controlled experiments, the same dynamic emerged. Even when the additional task provided no benefit and in some cases caused the employee to lose out on performance‑based pay, managers favored the intrinsically motivated worker. They did so despite having information about both employees’ performance, tenure, and workload.
“Our research points to a psychological mechanism we define as ‘motive oversimplification,’” said Woolley. “Managers assume that if an employee enjoys their main work, they will also enjoy extra tasks, even if those tasks are tedious, undesirable or unrelated to the employee’s strengths.”
This assumption has two consequences: Managers believe the intrinsically motivated employee will enjoy the additional task more, and managers infer that such employees are at lower risk of burnout. Both perceptions are wrong. Intrinsically motivated employees do not enjoy unrelated additional tasks more, and they experience just as much burnout risk as their less‑motivated colleagues. But the simplified belief persists, shaping how work gets distributed.
The misallocation isn’t harmless. One laboratory experiment demonstrated that when managers assigned an additional task to intrinsically motivated employees, those employees performed worse on their primary job duties, completing fewer trials in a time‑sensitive task. They were also significantly less likely to earn a performance bonus — not because of poor skill, but because they were diverted into unwanted extra work.
A separate multiday simulation showed the effect compounding over time: Managers repeatedly assigned extra tasks to the more intrinsically motivated employee across six consecutive days, creating a noticeable imbalance.
Interestingly, shifting to an equal distribution of additional tasks did not harm less‑motivated employees. Instead, it boosted fairness perceptions across the board.
The authors note that extra tasks can hinder career growth, especially when they resemble low‑promotability work — tasks beneficial to the organization but not to the worker. Over time, these inequities can shape professional trajectories as well as team morale.
The good news: Managers can change this pattern. The researchers identified two practical interventions that significantly reduce biased task allocation. First, make decisions in batches, not one at a time. When managers made multiple allocation decisions together — rather than handling tasks as they popped up — they became more conscious of workload balance. This broader view reduced the tendency to choose the intrinsically motivated employee.
Second, educate managers about burnout risks for intrinsically motivated employees. Simply reading a short article explaining that enthusiastic workers are still vulnerable to burnout dramatically reduced biased task allocation. After reading it, managers assigned tasks more evenly, choosing the intrinsically motivated employee at rates no different from chance.
“The findings emphasize a subtle but important organizational challenge: Enthusiasm should not be treated as an infinite resource,” said Woolley. “Managers often believe they are acting fairly or even helpfully by assigning more work to intrinsically motivated employees, but the data show that these intentions can backfire.”
