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.”

Read the full story on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business website.

Sarah Magnus-Sharpe is director of public relations and communications at the SC Johnson College of Business.