The Tax on Passion

Researchers at Organization Science just published a finding that should make any leader uncomfortable.

When managers need to assign extra work, they consistently choose the person who seems to love what they do. Not the one with the most available capacity. Not the one whose development would benefit most from the stretch. The one who appears most engaged.

The mechanism is straightforward. The manager assumes the intrinsically motivated employee will enjoy the additional task. And because they’ll enjoy it, they probably won’t burn out. So the assignment feels safe.

The researchers call this motive oversimplification.

I’d call it what happens when individual judgment operates without a system to check it.

The problem is that they’re making consequential decisions in an information vacuum. Nobody has shown them a full picture of what their most engaged employees are already carrying. Nobody has built a process that surfaces workload distribution before it becomes a retention problem. Nobody has created the conditions for the truth to travel.

So they do what humans do when they lack good information. They rely on instinct. And their instinct says: give it to the person who cares.

Over time the pattern compounds. Your most engaged employees accumulate the heaviest loads. Your least invested ones are protected by their own indifference. The gap widens. Eventually you lose someone you couldn’t afford to lose, and the exit interview tells you things that should have been visible two years earlier.

That is not a management failure. It is an infrastructure failure.

The fix isn’t a memo reminding managers to be more equitable. It’s building the visibility, the conversation structures, and the decision processes that make the right call easier to reach than the intuitive one.

Here’s what that actually looks like.

Make workload visible before decisions get made. Most organizations have no aggregate view of what individuals are carrying. A regular team-level weekly or biweekly (or some regular cadence that makes sense) check where managers log active assignments by person, not just by project, is usually enough. The goal isn’t bureaucracy. It’s making the invisible visible before the next ask lands on someone’s desk.

Separate the “who has capacity” question from the “who will say yes” question. These feel like the same question but they aren’t. Before assigning extra work, a manager should ask explicitly: what is this person currently carrying, and what would have to move to make room? That single question interrupts the intuitive reach for the engaged employee.

Create a workload conversation at the right level. Individual managers can’t always see the full picture. Their peers can. A standing agenda item in manager meetings that asks “where is load distributed unevenly” surfaces patterns no single manager would catch alone. It also creates shared accountability for the outcome.

Treat high engagement as a flag, not just a positive signal. If someone scores high on meaning and commitment in your engagement data or 1:1s, that’s good news. It should also prompt a question: are we systematically over-relying on this person? High engagement plus high workload is a retention risk hiding in plain sight.

Build the off-ramp into the assignment conversation. When extra work does go to a high-performer, make the tradeoff explicit: what comes off your plate to make this work? That normalizes the idea that capacity is finite and puts the manager on record acknowledging the tradeoff rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.

None of this is complicated. None of it requires a new system or a consultant.

It requires treating workload distribution as an organizational process rather than a personal judgment call left to every manager to figure out independently.

Because the employee who cares the most is an asset.

Treating them like a shock absorber is how you lose them. It’s a good instinct to want your high engagement employees to have opportunity, but it has to really be opportunity.