Is More Always Better? The Too-Much-of-a-Good-Thing Effect in Management

When scholars and practitioners think about managing people in organizations, they are often interested in achieving, one way or another, beneficial outcomes for individuals and organizations. For example, scholars may study which factors relate to individuals' job satisfaction or motivation, or how the culture of an organization contributes to its performance. Managers, human resources professionals, consultants, and others, then use this knowledge to know how to behave and what organizational structures to design, so that these beneficial factors are enhanced. In both research and practice, people oftentimes assume, implicitly or explicitly, that more is better. For example, when studying the relation between motivation and job performance, they would typically assume that more motivation should lead to continuously higher job performance. In this technical note, we challenge the assumption that more is always better, we review existing evidence of the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect, and present practical guidelines to avoid it.