Who Will be Assigned Unreasonable Tasks by Supervisors: A Conjoint Survey Experiment

Supervisors sometimes assign employees tasks that employees may perceive as unreasonable because they fall outside their formal job duties. Prior research has mostly focused on the negative effects of unreasonable tasks on employee outcomes, without examining the fundamental question of who is more likely to be assigned such tasks by their supervisors. To answer this question, we examined three distinct logics underlying the assignment of unreasonable tasks based on employee attributes (i.e., age, gender, task performance, helping behavior, recent workload, and relationship closeness): stereotype‐driven logic, efficiency‐driven logic, and exchange‐driven logic. In a fully randomized conjoint survey experiment, we asked 464 supervisors to allocate an unreasonable task based on evaluations of 4640 hypothetical employee profiles, with profiles varying randomly on six employee attributes. Results show that supervisors are more likely to assign unreasonable tasks to younger employees who perform better on tasks, exhibit more helping behavior, currently have lighter workloads, and maintain closer relationships with their supervisor. The relatively stronger effects of employees' recent workload, task performance, and helping behavior suggest that the efficiency‐driven logic plays the most influential role in shaping supervisors' unreasonable task assignments. We discuss the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of our findings.