This is the hidden cost of being a ‘good’ worker 

Has an event outside of work ever made you stop and realize that work has taken over more of your life than you realized? These events are called crossover jolts. They often sneak up on us after we’ve been in a job for a while. When we begin a new role, we start by mastering the tasks in our job description. But then we start taking on more responsibilities. 

There’s a name for this phenomenon—job creep. Tasks that were once above and beyond our job duties slowly become the norm. Imagine working toward the deadline on a big project. During the final week, we respond to emails at night after the kids have gone to bed (even though we promised ourselves we would never be a person who does that). 

In doing so, we’ve sent a signal to our coworkers that we’ll respond at night. So even after the big project is done, we feel the need to occasionally check our email before bed and respond. Without realizing it, our work life has annexed a small part of our personal life. We’ve chosen to go beyond our job description on behalf of the company. 

When job creep turns from good to bad 

When we love our job and are advancing in our careers, job creep isn’t bad. It’s how we develop as employees and climb the organizational ladder. Because it happens gradually, we often don’t notice this ballooning. Until it causes an event that disrupts our well-being or relationships outside of work. At that point, job creep becomes a potential barrier to our pursuit of the good life. 

So why do so many of us unwittingly give in to job creep? Because companies reward this behavior. 

What motivates us at work 

To truly understand the roots of crossover jolts, we need to take a journey into our motivation at work. We also need to examine the good, the bad, and the ugly of being seen as a good “organizational citizen.” 

Think for a moment about what being a good citizen in society means to you. You’ll probably imagine someone who helps neighbors in need. Picks up trash on the sidewalk. Attends community meetings. Similarly, acts of citizenship at work refer to the positive things you do, often of your own accord, that are above and beyond your job description. 

When you manage this well, citizenship behaviors can be part of a healthy cycle between you and your company. Let’s spend a minute talking about this cycle, because one of the neatest discoveries ever made in organizational psychology had to do with it, citizenship, and our relationship with work. It began with a big question: 

Are happy employees more productive than unhappy employees? 

The relationship between happy employees and productivity

For a long time, researchers tried to find a clear answer to this question. If employee satisfaction leads to higher performance, companies would be wise to spend big to make and keep employees happy, which ends up driving higher performance. To many of us, it makes intuitive sense that satisfied employees would perform better at their jobs than disgruntled ones. 

The only problem is that the relationship between worker happiness and worker performance proved difficult to find. It’s not that happiness lowered productivity. But in a lot of jobs, how happy employees were at work had no relationship with their job performance. 

This led some to conclude that how employees feel at work doesn’t matter, leaving leaders to question how important it is to invest in employee satisfaction. (For context, this was back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, an era that gave us the start of mass corporate layoffs and the phrase “greed is good.”) 

Worker satisfaction and productivity 

It was during this time that an organizational researcher named Dennis Organ made an astute observation. In many jobs, employees don’t have much influence over their job performance. Think of an assembly line. Whether a worker is happy or not about their work probably has minimal bearing on how the line runs on an average day. When they’re dissatisfied, they really can’t slow down much. But if they’re feeling great about their job, it’s not like they can speed up the line. 

When you look at the core of many jobs, you see that a good chunk of worker performance is determined by things outside the worker’s direct control. As a result, whether workers are happy or dissatisfied often has little effect on their output. 

The true impact of worker satisfaction

So, does that mean that worker satisfaction doesn’t matter to the bottom line? Here’s where Organ made his brilliant prediction. 

Workers’ happiness may have a limited effect on performance in the core aspects of their jobs. But whether workers are satisfied at work should predict whether they engage in good deeds at work beyond their required duties. 

Per Organ’s reasoning, when workers are happy at work, they’ll be more likely to help coworkers who need a hand, to stay late and arrive early if needed, and go to optional meetings. 

The downside of being a good corporate citizen

Workers have control over whether they engage in these extra behaviors. All these things, which he labeled organizational citizenship behaviors, should contribute to higher company performance. In essence, Organ predicted that companies that invest in employees’ happiness will outperform those that do not, because happier employees lead to greater citizenship, which provides a competitive advantage. 

Research has gone on to support Organ’s prediction. When employees have positive job attitudes or when the company invests in them, they become more likely to engage in citizenship. In turn, when a company invests in employees, it makes their workers happy and willing to reciprocate by engaging in citizenship behaviors, and they are rewarded for doing so. That’s a happy story, right? 

But citizenship behaviors are a double-edged sword for employees. Sure, they can be a ticket to career satisfaction and success. But they also have a darker side and can be a source of harm. By definition, citizenship behaviors involve employees spending energy above and beyond that required by their normal tasks. In many cases, that extra effort leaves people depleted when they get home from work. 

The evidence is clear that if left unchecked, being a good citizen at work can lead to being a bad citizen at home (even as you are praised for it at work). 

The signs of job creep 

To assess whether job creep is taking over your life, look to “the how” and “the who” of your time and energy outside of work. Most of us have an idea of the ideal activities that would make up our mornings, evenings, and weekends. Perhaps a slow cup of coffee after waking up, some reading time in the evening, and a long bike ride on the weekend. Often, when we realize our ability to engage in these desired nonwork activities has slipped away, we blame ourselves or just tell ourselves that we’re in a busy period, and put it out of mind. But there’s a good chance that job creep is at work. 

In terms of the who, you could probably easily list the small or big handful of relationships that are most important in your personal life. If you’re increasingly chiding yourself for either not spending enough time with these folks or not showing up for them with the best version of yourself (or they’re telling you these things directly), job creep is a likely culprit.  

How to mitigate job creep

A key to mitigating job creep is having regular “check-ins” with your job. Every six months or so, track your time closely for one week. Record how you spend your minutes and hours inside and outside of work. You can then compare that to your last check-in. Or, for the first time, compare it to the mental image of your ideal workweek, and identify any areas where work has crept up around your personal life. If you find that it has, the next step is to look for opportunities to either prune back those areas  or keep the creep but pinpoint other areas you can trim to reclaim your personal time. This could involve delegating some tasks to others or outsourcing some duties to AI. Or simply stopping activities that don’t create value for you or the company, like listening to a coworker’s repeated venting.  

The idea here is not to avoid being a good citizen, but to develop a rhythm of letting go of low-value tasks as you pick up new ones, rather than simply letting it all creep up over time. 

This is an excerpt from JOLTED: Why We Quit, When to Stay, and Why It Matters. It is reprinted and adapted with permission from Viking. Copyright © 2026.