Think about the most loyal person on your team.
The one who stays late without being asked. Who takes on extra projects without complaint. Who never pushes back when the ask is unreasonable.
Now think about who gets those asks most often.
Researchers at Duke University, West Virginia University, and Arizona State University ran four studies to examine what actually happens to loyal employees in organizations.
The finding wasn’t what most managers would expect.
Loyal workers aren’t protected. They aren’t rewarded first.
They are selectively targeted for exploitation.
The mechanism is precise.
Managers don’t target loyal employees out of malice. They target them because of an assumption — that loyal people are willing to make personal sacrifices for those they’re loyal to.
That assumption is accurate.
And it’s exactly what makes loyal employees exploitable.
.
.
Study 1 showed that workers with reputations for loyalty were perceived as more willing to accept poor treatment — and were disproportionately selected to receive it.
Study 2 confirmed the pattern held even after controlling for other variables.
Then the researchers turned the question around.
What happens to workers who agree to be exploited?
Studies 3 and 4 found the reverse pathway: employees who accepted poor treatment without resistance acquired strongerreputations for loyalty.
Which made them more likely to be targeted again.
This is the part that should stop you.
Loyalty and exploitation aren’t opposites in this data.
They are a loop.
The loyal employee accepts the unreasonable ask. That acceptance signals loyalty. That signal attracts the next unreasonable ask. The loop tightens — and the researchers call it exactly what it is: a vicious circle.
This has an implication most leadership frameworks don’t address.
Organizations spend significant resources building cultures of loyalty. They measure it, reward it, name it in their values statements.
But if loyal behavior makes employees more exploitable — and exploitation reinforces the reputation for loyalty — then cultures that celebrate loyalty without structural protections aren’t building commitment.
They’re building a system that extracts from the people most invested in it.
The question this research leaves open is not whether loyalty matters.
It does. The prosocial effects are real. Trust, cooperation, cohesion — these are genuine organizational assets.
The question is whether your organization rewards loyalty — or simply assumes it will absorb whatever the organization needs it to absorb.
Those are not the same thing.
And your most loyal employees already know the difference.
They just haven’t said anything yet.
Source: Stanley ML, Neck CB, Neck CP. Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2023. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104442
