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Being the most committed employee in the office has a serious health risk: the more someone enjoys their job, the more trouble they end up making. things that don’t belongwhich are not going to add to your career and which, over time, can end up burning him.

At least that’s what he claims an investigation from Cornell University and Northeastern University in which 4,300 employees from different sectors have participated. As and as he declared Sangah Bae, one of its main researchers, Northeastern Global News, This study was born from his own experience as a junior analyst in Chicago: the more involved he became, the more extra work fell on him. Years later, data confirm that this pattern was no coincidence.

It’s not a coincidence: it’s a pattern. The researchers found that managers tend to assign additional tasks to employees who perceive as more motivated. In a field survey with 834 middle managers, 55% chose the employee they considered most motivated to assign extra tasks, even when the managers had data on variables such as age, experience or work performance, the perception of the employee’s motivation prevailed in their choice.

The laboratory experiment was even more revealing since the researchers designed groups of three people in which one played the role of manager and the other two as employees, competing for a financial bonus linked to their performance. In this scenario, 74% of those acting as managers assigned the extra task to the most motivated employee, even though they knew that this hurt their chances of collecting that bonus.

As a result, only about 31.37% of the most motivated employees ended up receiving an extra bonus for their performance improvement.

Motivational oversimplification. According to the study According to Bae and Woolley, behind this tendency is a specific psychological mechanism that researchers have called “motivational oversimplification.” The manager’s reasoning is based on the fact that, if this employee enjoys his main job, he will probably also enjoy any extra task equally, even if it has nothing to do with what he usually does and is monotonous and routine tasks that they do not contribute anything.

The researchers say that managers “can assume that employees who enjoy their main job will also enjoy additional tasks and that this enjoyment will protect them from burnout.” That is, if it is assumed that the employee will enjoy the task, it is assumed that it will not cost him that much to do it.

The study data quantifies this perception gap: managers estimated a drop of just 0.2 points in the motivated employee’s job satisfaction when assigned extra work, while affected employees reported a drop of a full point on that same scale.

When motivation turns against you. In one of the study tests carried out over a period of six days, managers chose the most motivated employee 69% of the time, which is equivalent to an average of 4.2 out of every 6 extra tasks assigned. This assignment pattern was repeated every day, which suggests that managers generate systematic inequality in the workload within their teams without being aware of it.

“When managers have to assign extra work to their employees, they opt for the easiest option: a person they can trust. That employee who is your shortcut, that person you turn to regularly, who seems to be engaged and enjoy their work, could actually be silently suffering burnout,” Bae said.

…and the motivation runs out. As revealed the study OSH Pulse 2025 of the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), 44% of EU workers are regularly exposed to task overload. In Spain, this percentage reaches 49%, and one in three European workers (29%) acknowledges having suffered stress, depression or anxiety caused or aggravated directly by their work in the last twelve months. In Spain, the number of employees affected by task overload rises to 40%.

As and how they stand out in Harvard Business Reviewthe study by Cornell and Northeastern Universities adds a new variable that these occupational health data do not include: this burden is not distributed randomly among all employees of a company, but rather tends to concentrate precisely on the employees who are most involved.