This New Year, Resolve Against Workaholism

Leaders can help employees who prioritize their jobs at the expense of their personal lives to improve their work-life balance — to everyone’s benefit.

Thomas Kelemen and Michael Matthews Reading Time: 6 min 

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Employees often go the extra mile by staying late or helping a coworker with an assignment. These actions — known as citizenship behaviors — are especially beneficial to the companies where these employees work. In fact, research shows that employee citizenship behavior enhances both team and company performance. For years, scholars have recognized these behaviors as a core way that supervisors evaluate overall job performance.

However, some workers go far beyond common citizenship behaviors and cross important work-life boundaries — by using their own money for company expenses, working during vacations, or canceling plans to spend time with their families, for instance. These extreme citizenship behaviors can be detrimental to employee well-being, team culture, and the fabric of our communities.

One reason extreme citizenship behaviors are so damaging is that they create social norms that can be challenging to abandon — for example, pulling one all-nighter for a project can lead to two all-nighters for the next assignment. Indeed, social norms can be even more powerful than formal rules and regulations. As individuals witness others’ attempts to win the boss’s favor, they may feel obligated to follow suit by mimicking a coworker’s extreme citizenship behavior even though it conflicts with their own life arrangements. Ultimately, these overextensions can lead to fatigue, unethical behavior, turnover, and work-family conflict.

To understand extreme citizenship better, we recently polled more than 400 knowledge workers in the U.S. and the U.K. As many of us start the new year with resolutions and aspirational goals like getting promoted, you should consider these insights from our study to help promote a healthy work-life balance for yourself and your team.

Extreme Citizenship Behaviors Are Real

Our first finding is that extreme citizenship behaviors are indeed happening, despite recent hubbub over quiet quitting. Employees we surveyed told stories of reporting for work the day after their mother passed away and rushing back to work after their child’s birth. Others said they worked right after surgery, while sick with COVID-19, until 3 a.m. on Christmas Day, or during their grandmother’s funeral.

Indeed, 93% of the employees surveyed indicated that they had engaged in some form of extreme citizenship behavior.

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About the Authors

Thomas Kelemen is an assistant professor of management at Kansas State University. Michael Matthews is a doctoral candidate in management and international business at the University of Oklahoma.

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Comment (1)
Robin Ram
A follow up this could go over how workaholics should deal with leaders who keep pouring unhuman amounts of work on to them.  Workaholics are not always that way because they just love their work so much that the can't get away from it.  Its because they 'care', and sometimes too much, about their customers and leaders... and both those groups know that well, and so they become over reliant and even abuse their right to get from workaholics what they want.  They go over board often, and with their increasing and unrealistic demands impose upon workaholics.. what then are those workaholics to do?  They've often times gotten great secular education and work experiences, but what perhaps they need now is to know how to say 'no' to unrealistic expectations and demands from their leaders and customers.  Boundaries makes sense, but I think there's a little more than that, that needs to be covered.  Hoping that will be one of your next articles.