Much research shows that an employee’s workload shapes their work life and broader well-being in important ways. Yet the antecedents of workload have largely been overlooked by organizational behavior scholars. To set a theoretical foundation for addressing this oversight, we conceptualize what we see as a central antecedent of employee workload, which we term work magnetism: an individual-specific, socially constructed, and relatively stable force, which attracts work requests to a person from others in a proximal work collective. Grounded in this conceptualization, we develop a theory of work magnetism in two parts. The first part elaborates two major antecedents of work magnetism: ‘ideal helper’ prototypicality and one’s position in a work collective. The second part seeks to explain both the contextual and employee-level moderators that most influence work magnetism’s positive impact on employee workload. Our theory thus provides an initial explanation of: 1) the social, structural, and psychological factors that lead certain employees to attract more work than others, and; 2) the conditions under which work magnetism most strongly impacts an employee’s workload. In doing so, we advance a systemic perspective on the constellation of factors that produce and maintain workload disparities in organizations.
