Imagine your boss stays at the office until 9 p.m. every night and answers emails all weekend during a busy quarter. Even if they never ask you to do the same, packing up your bag at 5 p.m. can suddenly feel uncomfortable. A new study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior investigates what happens when a manager’s dedication turns into an unspoken demand on their team.
Management research has traditionally viewed self-sacrificing bosses as inspirational figures who motivate employees purely through goodwill and shared purpose. This new investigation shows that a leader’s personal sacrifices can also push subordinates to give up their own time and interests out of social pressure to conform. At the same time, the findings show that managers can reduce this unspoken pressure by giving their workers more independence over how they do their jobs.
The Unspoken Demand of a Selfless Boss
Feifan Yang of Soochow University and colleagues set out to examine how a manager’s willingness to bear personal costs affects the people reporting to them. In organizational psychology, leader self-sacrifice refers to managers giving up personal privileges, comfort, or time to protect or advance their team and company. Common examples include taking a pay cut during a financial downturn, volunteering for difficult assignments, or working late nights and weekends to meet a collective goal.
For decades, scholars largely assumed that when leaders make these sacrifices, employees respond out of admiration and gratitude. According to this conventional view, workers see a self-sacrificing boss as caring and reliable, form a stronger bond with the organization, and voluntarily pitch in more effort to return the favor. Yang and colleagues argue that treating a leader’s self-sacrifice as purely supportive misses its demanding side.
Drawing on psychological theories of conformity, the authors propose that employees often adjust their behavior to match those around them in response to social pressure. In a workplace hierarchy, a manager’s actions carry heavy weight and signal “the way things are done” even without explicit rules. When a boss routinely gives up personal interests for the job, subordinates may infer that the same level of sacrifice is expected of them.
According to the researchers, this dynamic triggers what psychologists call normative conformity, which is the drive to fit in to gain social approval and avoid penalties. Employees who prefer to protect their personal time may still feel compelled to copy their boss’s sacrifices out of fear of being sidelined, judged as uncommitted, or passed over for promotions. The authors also wanted to see whether managers could prevent this pressure by practicing leader autonomy support, which involves giving employees meaningful choices, encouraging them to make independent decisions, and respecting their perspectives.
Testing the Pressure to Conform
Before testing their main hypotheses, the research team needed a reliable way to measure “self-sacrificial pressure,” which they define as the extent to which employees feel pushed to make personal sacrifices at work. They drafted a set of survey questions and had 13 experts in organizational behavior review them for clarity and accuracy. After testing and refining the questions with two preliminary groups totaling 352 working adults, the researchers established a five-item scale to measure this specific type of workplace pressure.
Next, Yang and colleagues ran an online experiment with 200 full-time working adults in China across industries including information technology, manufacturing, finance, and service. Participants were asked to imagine working on a company team whose workload had recently jumped due to an organizational restructuring. The researchers randomly assigned each participant to read one of two descriptions of how their team leader handled the crunch.
Half of the participants read that their leader responded by putting in far more effort than expected, working overtime every day, coming into the office on weekends, and leaving almost no time for family life. The other half read that their leader put in an average effort, kept regular working hours, and maintained time for family and personal life. Afterward, all participants rated how pressured they would feel to make personal sacrifices for the team and how willing they would be to actually make them.
The experiment showed that participants assigned to the overtime-working boss felt significantly more pressure to make personal sacrifices than those assigned to the boss who kept regular hours. This heightened feeling of pressure, in turn, led participants to report a greater willingness to sacrifice their own personal interests for the team. To make sure this effect was not simply the result of employees wanting to emulate an admirable boss, the researchers statistically accounted for whether participants viewed the leader as a role model, and the pressure-driven link still held.
Tracking Managers and Teams Over Time
To see how these dynamics play out in actual workplaces, the team conducted a four-week survey of 492 full-time employees and their 52 direct supervisors at a Fortune Global 500 company in China. In the first wave, employees rated how often their direct supervisor made personal sacrifices and how much independence and choice that supervisor provided. Two weeks later, the employees rated how much pressure they felt to make sacrifices at work, and two weeks after that, the supervisors evaluated how much each employee actually sacrificed for the team.
The workplace data aligned with the experimental results. Employees who reported having a self-sacrificing boss in the first survey tended to feel greater pressure to sacrifice two weeks later, and that pressure was associated with higher supervisor ratings of employee self-sacrifice at the four-week mark. The researchers also measured how strongly employees identified with their company and how positive their relationship was with their manager, confirming that the pressure pathway operated alongside those traditional positive motivators rather than being explained away by them.
In addition, the survey revealed how a manager’s everyday leadership style altered the results. Among managers who offered little support for employee independence, leader self-sacrifice was strongly linked to subordinates feeling pressured to give up their own interests. By contrast, when managers gave their workers high levels of choice and independence, the statistical link between a leader’s self-sacrifice and employee pressure disappeared.
Because the first workplace survey asked employees about their experiences in general terms, the researchers conducted a third study to establish a clearer timeline of events. They surveyed 231 employees and 39 supervisors at a large Chinese construction company across three waves separated by two-week intervals, this time instructing participants to rate behaviors and feelings strictly from the past two weeks. Once again, a manager’s self-sacrifice in the first period predicted higher employee pressure two weeks later and greater employee self-sacrifice two weeks after that, while high support for worker independence weakened the buildup of pressure.
Managing the Hidden Costs of Leading by Example
The authors note that their findings do not negate the positive benefits of leaders who put the team first, but they do highlight a hidden psychological demand that organizations often overlook. When managers routinely sacrifice their own time or comfort, subordinates may match that behavior not out of genuine dedication, but out of anxiety about what will happen if they refuse to conform. The researchers caution that when employees are pushed into giving up personal interests by social pressure, it can erode their well-being and eventually increase staff turnover.
To prevent well-intentioned dedication from turning into workplace stress, the authors recommend that managers avoid excessively encouraging staff to copy their personal sacrifices. Organizations can also train leaders to pair their hard work with clear support for employee independence, which signals to the team that deviating from the boss’s habits is acceptable and will not be punished. In practice, managers can build this buffer by listening to employees’ viewpoints before making decisions, showing empathy for their personal situations, and offering options when assigning work.
The researchers also point out a few limitations to keep in mind when interpreting their results. Although the third study tracked behaviors over two-week windows, relying on two-week summaries does not capture how employees react in the immediate moment they witness a boss making a sacrifice. In addition, all three studies were conducted in China, where collectivistic cultural norms place a strong emphasis on group harmony and fitting in, meaning future research is needed to test whether workers in more individualistic societies like the United States experience the same degree of pressure when working for a self-sacrificing boss.
