ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicNavigating Emotions at Work: Behavioral Consequences of Positivity and NegativityView all 5 articles
Beyond Hours: How Conformity-Driven Overtime Influences Work Withdrawal Behavior via Dual Psychological Mechanisms
Provisionally accepted
- Renmin University of China, Beijing, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Despite the prevalence of conformity-driven overtime in East Asian organizations, research on its psychological mechanisms and behavioral consequences remains scarce. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources model, this study examines how conformity-driven overtime affects work withdrawal behavior via resource depletion and resource compensation pathways, and how organizational market orientation moderates these dual processes. We conducted a four-wave longitudinal survey of 943 Chinese employees and analyzed the data using Structural Equation Modeling. Results indicate that conformity-driven overtime simultaneously triggers resource depletion via emotional suppression and resource compensation via enhanced organization-based self-esteem. These opposing processes converge on work-related burnout, which in turn predicts work withdrawal behavior. Importantly, organizational market orientation substantially alters these pathways. In fully market-oriented organizations, where the overtime effort-reward contingency is more predictable and transparent, the emotional suppression pathway becomes nonsignificant while the organization-based self-esteem pathway strengthens, compared to non-market-oriented organizations where overtime evaluative ambiguity prevails. These findings extend JD-R theory by demonstrating that a single job demand—conformity-driven overtime—can elicit both positive and negative psychological responses that vary across organizational contexts.
Keywords: conformity, Conformity-driven overtime, Facades of conformity, Overtime work, Work withdrawal behavior
Received: 23 Sep 2025; Accepted: 10 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Wei and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuhan Wang
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.