Many employees who take small, intentional steps to protect their work-life boundaries — from enabling an out-of-office autoreply for weekends to declining to answer work messages while on vacation — are often labeled less committed to their jobs and less eligible for promotion. This unfair judgment persists even when organizational leaders explicitly encourage workers to take these exact boundary-setting actions.
A new study exploring this widespread contradiction has coined a name for the pattern: the “detachment paradox.”
“We only analyzed behavior that occurs during time when workers are not required to be on the job, such as evenings, weekends, and approved vacation,” explains Elisa Solinas, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at IE University in Spain. “What we consistently found is that the more fully a worker disconnects from work during their personal time, the harsher they are judged by their managers.”
Managers simultaneously value work-life detachment and penalize employees for stepping away
To unpack this paradox, the research team divided participating managers into two test groups. Both groups received the exact same background description of a hypothetical employee, with one key variation: for one group, the fictional employee took a small step to disconnect from work during off-hours.
Managers consistently viewed the employee who set these minor, clear work-life boundaries as more focused, less stressed, and less at risk of long-term burnout. Yet despite these positive perceptions, the same managers also rated that boundary-setting employee as far less dedicated to their role.
“The very same managers who acknowledged that detaching from work would make this employee more productive also concluded they were less deserving of promotion,” says study co-author Eva Buechel, assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “So even leaders who openly state that work-life balance is a critical priority, and who actively encourage their teams to step away from work, still penalize employees when they actually follow that advice.”
The research team confirmed their core findings with a second round of testing, too. When they adjusted the experiment to replace hypothetical workers with descriptions of managers’ actual real team members in identical scenarios, they produced nearly identical results.
