Are You Overburdening Your Most Engaged Employees?

The article focuses on the issue of managers disproportionately assigning additional, non-core tasks to intrinsically motivated employees, which can reduce these employees’ job satisfaction and performance. Research involving over 4,300 managers and employees found that motivated workers receive the majority of extra tasks based on faulty assumptions that they enjoy all work and are less prone to burnout. The authors propose three low-cost interventions—tracking task assignments, batching assignment decisions, and updating managers’ beliefs about burnout—to promote fairer distribution of work without harming overall team performance. These behavioral changes aim to protect employee engagement, improve retention, and sustain productivity by preventing the overburdening of highly engaged employees. [Extracted from the article]