Quote:Beware of Employees Who Are Very Engaged in Their Work
Deeply engaged employees are likely to have difficulties in their personal lives and can become difficult to manage

Increasing work engagement has become a mantra for companies looking to get the most from their employees.

When employees are engaged at work, academic research shows, they tend to stay longer on the job and are more productive, self-motivated and happier coming to the office. Engaged employees are also more likely to see their job as a calling and derive deeper meaning from the day-to-day work.

But you can have too much of a good thing, and job engagement is no exception.

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Deeply engaged employees who become more difficult to manage can be overly demanding of superiors and become suspicious of their intentions, says Stuart Bunderson, professor of organizational ethics and governance at Washington University in St. Louis. When Prof. Bunderson first started looking at how zookeepers derived meaning from their work, for example, he learned that many tend to look at their job as a calling. That, in turn, made them tougher to manage than less-engaged employees. They also expected more from those above them. The zookeepers objected to placing a carousel at the zoo, for instance, because they saw it as trivializing the zoo’s mission, until it was repositioned to promote conservation, Prof. Bunderson found.

The professor also studied managers five years after receiving their M.B.A. degrees and found that the most engaged employees displayed similar qualities. A “higher sense of moral duty” makes it tougher for them to respect deadlines or work in a team, he says.

“There’s no such thing as acceptable compromises or good enough when things are framed in moral terms,” says Prof. Bunderson, who in January published a review of research into work as a calling. “So, for example, if I see my calling as helping my consulting clients find the best possible solution for their problem,” he says, “I will become especially frustrated when management tells me that I need to push certain solutions or limit the amount of time I can spend in problem diagnosis…especially when compared to my colleague for whom a job is just a job.”

Some researchers have found that work engagement has a negative impact on a personal level. In a 2018 study, after a three-month period, workers who said they felt emotional ties to their work reported experiencing more stress in reaction to workplace demands than workers who said they didn’t feel emotional ties to their work, says Thomas Britt, a psychology professor at Clemson University who studies work engagement.

Excessive work engagement may be especially detrimental for senior-level executives, says Ante Glavas, a University of Vermont professor who is studying the impact that engaged employees can have on their direct reports.


“You can have this existential level of engagement that leads to interpreting that the rules don’t apply to you,” says Dr. Glavas. Senior managers who exhibit this kind of behavior, he says, may start to ignore day-to-day responsibilities and feel it is their job to focus on social or environmental missions instead. Such managers also may feel that instead of focusing on their day-to-day roles, they should pursue projects that they deem more important or that are more prominent within the company.

Deeply engaged employees also are more likely to cut corners. In a study of lower-level sales employees in China, researchers found that pharmaceutical sales workers who were more engaged in their work were more likely to behave unethically on the job—doing such things as sabotaging colleagues to take credit for their work, leaving colleagues out of important meetings or not sharing relevant information with others on the team. “The feeling of [job] ownership is the key to increasing engagement and is associated with negative outcomes,” says Melody Jun Zhang, assistant professor of management at City University of Hong Kong.

So what can companies do to have healthy levels of work engagement, without crossing the line into excessive levels? Ease up, some researchers say.

One suggestion is that companies should skip the emphasis on engaging workers through corporate social responsibility, which often takes place outside of an employee’s direct job description. In a 2016 review of literature on the subject, Prof. Glavas found evidence suggesting that attempting “corporate social responsibility strategies” such as volunteering is likely to breed employee resentment even as it creates more engagement.

Direct managers should focus on engaging those who are unengaged rather than attempting to raise overall engagement numbers, says Tomas Chamorro, chief talent scientist at staffing agency ManpowerGroup Inc. in New York. Surveys that seek to measure individual engagement or that compare employees with benchmarks at other companies can also increase the kind of extreme engagement that is detrimental, says Mr. Chamarro.