What is it about?
Every workplace seems to have a "go-to" person—the coworker everyone turns to for help, advice, problem-solving, or support. But how do these people become the go-to in the first place? Rather than carefully choosing the best person for each problem, our research suggests that employees often rely on a mental shortcut. Specifically, they look to the person who has the strongest relationship with their manager and assume that if the manager relies on them, they probably should too. Over time, these repeated decisions cause the same employees to receive more and more requests, making them the team's unofficial go-to person. Across multiple studies, we found that employees with stronger leader-member relationships were more likely to become go-to coworkers. However, this came with an important downside: these employees experienced greater burnout without receiving higher performance ratings. Our findings show that everyday decision-making can unintentionally concentrate work on a few employees and highlight a hidden cost of being the boss's "right hand."
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Why is it important?
We often assume that people become the workplace "go-to" because coworkers carefully choose the best person for each problem or because those employees intentionally cultivate that role. Our research challenges both assumptions. We show that employees can become the team's unofficial go-to simply because they have a strong relationship with their manager. Coworkers use this relationship as a shortcut when deciding whom to ask for help, repeatedly turning to the same employee across many different situations. Over time, these small, everyday decisions unintentionally concentrate requests on a few people. This matters because it can increase burnout without improving performance, highlighting a hidden cost of informal workplace collaboration and suggesting that organizations should pay closer attention to how helping responsibilities become distributed.
Perspectives
The idea for this paper came from watching a pattern unfold in our own workplace. Someone who had a close relationship with the leader gradually became everyone's go-to—not because they had sought out that role, but because coworkers increasingly treated them as the obvious person to ask for help. What struck us was that this seemed to happen almost without anyone intending it. That observation sparked the question behind this research. We hope our findings encourage managers and employees alike to think more carefully about how these informal roles develop and the hidden demands they can place on the people who end up filling them.
Emma Frank
Ohio State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How the boss’s “right hand” becomes the group’s “go-to”: Leader–member exchange as a heuristic cue for everyday asks., Journal of Applied Psychology, August 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/apl0001401.
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