It usually starts with a short email. “Just checking in over the break…”

Sometimes it’s framed as helpful. Sometimes as dedication. Occasionally as reassurance that nothing is falling through the cracks.

But over the holiday season, that message carries more meaning than its sender often realises. Because while it may feel like a signal of commitment, research and leadership experience suggest it often signals something else entirely.

Not dedication, but dysfunction.

When Availability Became a Proxy for Value

In many organisations, the idea that “the best people are always on” has quietly taken hold. The employee who responds on Christmas Eve. The manager who joins a call between family meals. The executive who proudly admits they “never really switch off.”

These behaviours are often admired. Sometimes rewarded. Yet ask senior leaders privately, and a different story emerges.

Many now admit that the colleagues they trust most are not the ones constantly visible over the holidays-but the ones who return in January sharper, calmer, and ready to think.

The contradiction is telling.

The HBR Wake-Up Call: Don’t Work on Vacation. Seriously.

In a widely discussed Harvard Business Review article – Don’t Work on Vacation. Seriously – Kaitlin Woolley at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and Laura Giurge at London Business School make a blunt case.

Time off only restores performance when people actually disconnect.

Checking email, staying half-available, or “just keeping an eye on things” prevents the psychological recovery that holidays are meant to provide. Worse, it creates the illusion of rest while delivering none of its benefits.

The result is not commitment, but cumulative depletion.

Burnout Signalling: When Overwork Becomes Theatre

One of the most uncomfortable insights from research at London Business School is the idea of burnout signalling.

In cultures where trust is low and evaluation is constant, people use visible overwork as proof of loyalty. Working through holidays becomes a performance – not for results, but for perception.

This is where what is often described as burnout signalling takes shape. When outcomes are hard to assess in real time, visible effort becomes a proxy for contribution. Availability is easier to reward than judgment. Working through the holidays becomes less about what the work requires, and more about what the culture notices.

The irony is stark: the more insecure the culture, the more effort people expend to be seen not resting.

When Overwork Becomes a Signal, Not a Strategy

Another way to understand why holiday overwork persists is to see it not as a personal failing, but as a cultural signal.Organisations drift into what are often described as extreme work cultures – systems where long hours, constant availability, and visible sacrifice become normalised indicators of value. 

LBS professor Lynda Gratton’s work is particularly instructive, because it traces how these norms take hold gradually, without ever being formally mandated.

As Gratton notes, “Extreme jobs have become more common, more demanding, and more exhausting – and many people now accept this as normal.”
That acceptance is the quiet turning point. Once overwork is absorbed as “just how things are done,” behaviour that might once have raised concern becomes a baseline expectation.

Holiday work fits squarely into this pattern. It rarely begins with an explicit demand. Instead, it emerges through observation and imitation. Someone responds to emails over Christmas. Someone else follows suit. Slowly, absence starts to feel risky, while availability starts to feel virtuous.

Gratton is clear that the problem here is not short-term output. Extreme work can look productive at first. But as her research repeatedly shows, what delivers in the short term proves unsustainable over time.

What makes this especially corrosive is leadership behaviour. People take their cues not just from what leaders say, but from what they model. When senior figures stay permanently reachable, they legitimise constant availability – even if they never ask for it outright. Over time, rest must be justified; recovery must be earned.

From this perspective, holiday overwork is not evidence of commitment. It is evidence of uncertainty, and of a system that has not yet learned how to recognise value without watching people exhaust themselves.

And that, as Gratton’s work reminds us, is not a sustainable path to performance – no matter how dedicated it looks in December.

Stanford’s Warning: Effort Has Diminishing Returns

This is where research from Stanford Graduate School of Business adds a crucial and often misunderstood layer.

Across multiple disciplines at Stanford, the evidence converges on a simple but uncomfortable point: sustained effort has diminishing, and eventually negative, returns.

One of the clearest voices on this comes from Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Jeffrey Pfeffer, whose research on work practices and performance has repeatedly shown that long hours and constant availability are a poor proxy for contribution. Pfeffer’s work documents how organisations routinely mistake endurance for effectiveness, even as decision quality and judgment quietly deteriorate.

Similarly, Baba Shiv, Professor of Marketing at the GSB has explored how cognitive capacity and decision-making decline under fatigue and overload. His research shows that the brain’s ability to evaluate risk, exercise self-control, and think creatively degrades when people are depleted – even when they remain outwardly “productive.” You may still be responding, deciding, and reacting, but you are doing so with reduced precision.

This matters enormously in knowledge work, where value is created not by hours logged but by judgment exercised.

Stanford researchers are particularly clear on this distinction: activity is not the same as effectiveness. After a certain point, additional effort doesn’t just fail to help, it actively increases the likelihood of errors, short-term thinking, and conservative decision-making.

By the time someone is answering emails during the holidays, they are rarely operating at peak cognitive capacity. They may be present, responsive, and visible, but they are not at their best.

What Stanford scholars often describe, in different ways, is an illusion of productivity: visible activity that reassures observers while masking declining effectiveness. 

The inbox is cleared. The response is sent. But the quality of thinking that organisations actually depend on – strategic judgment, creativity, perspective – has already begun to erode.

What High Performers Actually Do

Talk to experienced leaders, especially those who have scaled organisations or navigated multiple business cycles, and a pattern emerges.

The people who rise over the long term tend to:

• Protect recovery periods fiercely
• Signal availability before and after breaks, not during
• Delegate cleanly, rather than hover remotely
• Return with clearer perspective than when they left

They understand something subtle but important: commitment is demonstrated over years, not over holidays.

If someone needs to work through Christmas to prove their value, you worry about the system the company has built.

The Hidden Cost of “Just Checking In”

Holiday work rarely causes immediate damage. Its effects are cumulative and cultural.

When leaders send emails during the break, even with the caveat “no need to respond,” they unintentionally reset norms. Someone always responds. Someone always feels pressure.

Research from Cornell University shows that perceived expectations matter more than stated ones. Saying “this isn’t urgent” does not neutralise the signal that availability is being noticed.

One relevant strand comes from Professor Vanessa Bohns, the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University’s ILR School. She studies social influence, compliance, consent, why it’s so hard to ask for things, and why it’s so hard to say no

Her research on pressure and compliance shows that individuals routinely underestimate how much influence their requests, or even their presence carry. When someone with authority reaches out, recipients feel an implicit obligation to act, regardless of caveats. The message may say “no rush,” but the social signal says, this matters enough to interrupt your time off.

Over time, this erodes trust.

People stop resting fully. Creativity narrows. Risk aversion grows. January starts not with renewal, but with quiet fatigue.

When Did Being Unavailable Become a Career Risk?

Perhaps the most revealing question is this one: When did taking legitimate time off become something people felt the need to justify?

The answer often lies in leadership insecurity rather than organisational necessity. In high-trust environments, absence is not read as disengagement. It is read as confidence. In low-trust environments, presence becomes performative.

Holiday overwork, then, is not a badge of honour. It is a diagnostic.

It tells you something about how safe people feel to step away.

The most effective leaders are increasingly sending a different message during the holidays.

They plan handovers properly. They communicate boundaries clearly. They go quiet themselves.

And when they return, they don’t reward who was most visible, they reward who is most effective.

This aligns closely with the HBR argument from LBS and Cornell: recovery is not a perk. It is a performance input.

What Leaders Should Ask Themselves This Season

Over the Holiday Season as inboxes thin out, leaders might consider a different set of questions:

• What does my behaviour signal about expectations?
• Do people believe they can truly disconnect without penalty?
• Am I rewarding outcomes, or endurance theatre?
• If someone works through the holidays, is that a strength or a warning sign?

These are uncomfortable questions. But they are leadership questions.

The contrarian insight is not that people shouldn’t care. It’s that care expressed as constant availability is often misplaced.

Working through the holidays rarely signals commitment to the work. More often, it signals commitment to being seen.

And the organisations that confuse the two tend to burn out their best people – quietly, politely, and just in time for the new year.

As one senior partner at a global firm reflected, “The people I trust most are the ones who disappear properly – and come back thinking better than before.”

That may be the most reliable signal of commitment there is.

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