Work Assignments: No Good Deed goes Unpunished
Ever feel like your reward for doing good work is to be overburdened with more work? There is research to support this. Employees who are self-motivated and enjoy their work are assigned additional tasks outside of their area responsibility more often than their less motivated colleagues. This is because supervisors mistakenly believe the high-performing workers will not mind, researchers Sangah Bae and Kaitlin Woolley write in Organizational Science. Leaders also erroneously assume that since the selected workers enjoy their own work, the additional work will not contribute to burnout.
But the researchers call these assumptions “oversimplistic.” An employee who enjoys their work does not automatically enjoy additional tasks that fall outside of their core responsibilities. Disproportionately assigning additional tasks to these intrinsically motivated employees can harm their engagement and long-term retention, the researchers found. This is true for both high profile and low profile tasks.
The assignment of additional tasks that are low profile and routine (e.g. planning office parties or ordering lunch) are further disproportionately assigned to women, economist Linda Babock (et. al) found. These low-promotability tasks help the organization but not the individual’s career. Time spent on office housework tasks like these is time diverted from career-advancing activities.
In contrast, “glamour work” has a higher profile and gives opportunities for career advancement. “[W]omen and people of color do more office housework and have less access to glamour than white men do,” legal scholars Joan C. Williams and Marina Multhaup found.
This disparity hold true across professions, the scholars learned. A survey of 3,000 engineers found “women were 29% more likely than white men to report doing more office housework than their colleagues.” At the same time they are doing more office housework, women are also offered fewer opportunities for glamour work, the same study found. Among engineers, the glamour-gap as compared to white men was 35% for women of color and 20% for white women.
Tracking how tasks are assigned and distributing them across all workers has the potential to decrease burnout, increase long-term retention, and contribute to a more equitable workplace.
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