Proactivity at work: managing the cost of going the extra mile

Employees are more and more encouraged, and even expected, to be proactive in their workplace. That is, you are no longer expected to only fulfill your prescribed tasks. You are also expected to take initiative to improve how these tasks are executed. With good reason: beyond a positive impact on individual and organizational performance, proactivity helps people experience more meaningful jobs (2) and fully engage in them (3).

However, such a vision of proactivity only tells part of the story. What if going the extra mile through proactivity can actually make you worse at your job by harming your cognitive performance? That’s what we tried to investigate (1) with my co-authors Prof. Karoline Strauss (ESSEC Business School), Prof. Doris Fay (Potsdam University), and Julia Smith (ESSEC Business School).

The Cognitive Cost of Proactivity

When you are fulfilling your prescribed tasks at work, routines are likely part of your everyday performance. When you execute a task routinely, you are in “auto-pilot mode” (4). Routines are thus useful as they save you mental effort (5). That means that breaking away from routines to find more efficient ways to execute a task steers you away from that auto-pilot mode.

When you are proactively improving a task, not only do you deviate from a routine, you actually engage on top of that in a host of cognitively effortful processes (6): imagining alternative ways of doing that task, deciding which one fits better your needs and resources, planning your chosen course of action, executing the task based on that new way you’ve envisioned, evaluating and fine-tuning the new process as you reflect on it, etc.

Given this mentally effortful nature of proactivity, it’s not unexpected if you lose focus, if you miss important details, if simple tasks and decisions may take you more effort than usual after a proactive day. In short, you may be experiencing the cognitive cost of proactivity.

Investigating this Cost

To explore the cognitive impact of going the extra mile at work, we conducted a series of studies. These included mainly 2 daily diary studies and 2 experiments.

In a first daily diary study we sought French participants from a range of ages, positions, and industries and asked them to complete a survey at the end of their real workday. Across 3 to 5 work days, 163 participants completed a cognitive performance test and answered a short survey about their work day. For instance, we asked about the extent to which they engaged in proactive behavior as well as about their routine task performance. To measure cognitive performance, we opted for a novel design. We could have asked participants about their subjective experience of cognitive performance. However, as responses may have been biased due to other factors (motivation, mood, etc.), we administered instead a quick memory game (the n-back test) typically used to assess working memory as an indicator of cognitive performance. Our results showed that on days participants engaged in task proactivity, their performance in the cognitive test plummeted.

Despite these promising results questions persisted about the possible impact of other factors outside proactivity. For instance, we wondered whether participants started their day with low cognitive performance levels (because of poor sleep for example) which may have led to low performance in the evening regardless of proactive behavior during the work day. We conducted thus a second daily diary study with 93 French workers, monitoring cognitive performance both in the morning and at the end of the day over 3 to 7 workdays. We also inquired about other factors such as workload, conflict with colleagues, and multitasking to rule out potential explanations to our results. Even after accounting for these factors, the results of this study remained consistent with the first one: daily task proactivity was associated with poorer end-of-day cognitive performance.

To further our analysis and probe into the potential mechanism behind this effect, we conducted two main follow-up experiments with a total of 637 UK workers. We asked them to describe both a routine activity and a task they thought they could improve (including how they would improve it, demonstrating proactive envisioning and planning). Participants then rated the mental effort required by each task and how much it deviated from their usual routine. Results confirmed our reasoning: proactivity breaks from established routines and calls upon more mental effort compared to completing a task routinely.

Any Way Around the Cognitive Cost of Proactivity?

Looking at these results, you may wonder whether proactivity should be avoided altogether given its cognitive costs. Well, not really. Studies have shown that proactivity has short-term and long-term benefits both for individuals and organizations. Rather than discouraging proactivity, we can instead encourage an active management of its cognitive cost.

One way to manage this cost is through taking frequent breaks throughout the day, especially on proactive days (7). That can be taking a walk, giving yourself space to breath (literally, away from screens) (8), taking a short nap, etc. Your choice as long as it allows recovering mental resources. For managers, this means encouraging or requiring breaks for your staff.

Another suggestion has to do with flexible scheduling and task prioritizing. Accommodate the mental fatigue of proactivity by scheduling your day in a flexible way. For example, prioritize proactive tasks that require great attention when your mind is sharper. For many of us, that would be earlier in the work day. For managers, this means allowing flexibility in their employees’ schedules to counterbalance the cognitive cost of being proactive (9). This can be through alternative work arrangements (flexible hours, remote work, etc.). It can also be through more efficient organizing of team activities. For instance, if employees spent their morning brainstorming process improvements, important meetings or high-stakes activities should not be organized in the afternoon.

Finally, as proactivity comes with experimenting, mistakes may happen. That’s part of the learning and fine-tuning process. Organizations and managers need to build and maintain a culture of psychological safety (10) where individuals can feel safe experimenting without fear of being punished or penalized. Shielding employees from the consequences of honest errors helps reducing pressure for individuals and frees up their mental power to focus on task improvements.

To Conclude…

While our studies shed light on the cognitive cost of proactivity, at least in the short-term, questions still remain about longer-term effects. For example, can repeated proactivity become less cognitively costly with time? Future research is needed to unravel such mysteries. In the meantime, keep in mind that proactivity matters and that managing its costs matters too!

References

(1) El Mansouri, M., Strauss, K., Fay, D., & Smith, J. (2024). The cognitive cost of going the extra mile: How striving for improvement relates to cognitive performance.Journal of Applied Psychology, 109(10), 1592–1610 - https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0001199

(2) Fay, D., Strauss, K., Schwake, C., & Urbach, T. (2023). Creating meaning by taking initiative: Proactive work behavior fosters work meaningfulness. Applied Psychology, 72(2), 506–534- https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12385

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Van der Linden D, Frese M, Sonnentag S. The impact of mental fatigue on exploration in a complex computer task: rigidity and loss of systematic strategies. Hum Factors. 2003 Fall;45(3):483-94 - https://doi.org/10.1518/hfes.45.3.483.27256

(7) Albulescu P, Macsinga I, Rusu A, Sulea C, Bodnaru A, Tulbure BT. "Give me a break!" A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLoS One. 2022 Aug 31;17(8):e0272460 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272460

A Guide to Taking Better Breaks at Work (Feb. 2025) Harvard Business Review. By Kira Schabram and Christopher M. Barnes - https://hbr.org/2025/02/a-guide-to-taking-better-breaks-at-work

(8) Research: Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress (Sept. 2020) Harvard Business Review. By Emma Seppälä, Christina Bradley and Michael R. Goldstein - https://hbr.org/2020/09/research-why-breathing-is-so-effective-at-reducing-stress

(9) The Future of Flexibility at Work (Sept. 2021) Harvard Business Review. By Ellen Ernst Kossek, Patricia Gettings and Kaumudi Misra - https://hbr.org/2021/09/the-future-of-flexibility-at-work

(10) Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999 (Original work published 1999)

Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review and Extension (2016) Personnel Psychology. Volume 70, Issue 1. Spring 2017. M. Lance Frazier, Stav Fainshmidt, Ryan L. Klinger, Amir Pezeshkan, Veselina Vracheva. - https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183

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