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Late in the evening, at 10:48 p.m., Anna emails Maja and adds: “You don’t need to reply now.”
The next day she asks:
— Maja, why are you still working after hours? I genuinely don’t expect that.
— Because I can see what the person setting the standard here actually does.
Anna sees her own preferred working rhythm. Maja sees the behavior of the CEO, which may communicate more than the official message.
How does Empatyzer help leaders avoid normalising overtime?
Empatyzer helps you see that a leader can say "don't work at night" and send the opposite signal with their behaviour. This makes it easier to understand how informal norms are created.
Features that can help:
- Your leadership style: Helps you see how you naturally influence people, make decisions and respond to disagreement, which is important in the "I'm not making you work all night" situation.
- Organisational culture: Shows the preferred and actual organisational culture, which helps check whether the "I'm not keeping you working late" situation has to do with the prevailing norm of the company or team, and not just the nature of the individuals.
- Talk to Em about your team: Allows you to discuss the "I'm not making you work late at night" issue with Em in the context of the entire team and prepare a common rule that will limit similar misunderstandings in the future.
What really happened
Anna may sincerely believe that working late is entirely her own choice. She is not ordering anyone to do the same, she does not ask in the morning why Maja failed to answer at 11 p.m., and she may even consciously tell people to rest. Maja is observing something else: the person at the top regularly works late and sends messages at that time. To her, that behavior is information about what commitment really looks like in this organization, even if the formal rule sounds more relaxed. Power means that a personal habit can start functioning as an informal standard.
What the research says
People learn organizational norms by observing the behavior of people with status and power—a social-learning mechanism long studied in organizations (Manz & Sims, 1977; Belschak & Den Hartog, 2026). Research also maps closely onto this exact scenario: recipients of non-urgent after-hours emails overestimated how quickly senders expected a reply, while senders underestimated the stress their messages created—a pattern described as email urgency bias (Giurge & Bohns, 2021). Other work suggests that informal expectations of constant availability, rather than policy alone, are strongly linked to pressure to respond quickly, often discussed as workplace telepressure (Barber, Santuzzi & Hu, 2026). A leader does not need to issue an instruction for their behavior to create a norm.
How to handle it
If Anna prefers working at night, she does not have to change her own rhythm, but she can change the signal she sends to others. The simplest option is to schedule messages for the morning or write: “I’m sending this now because this is when I work. I do not expect a response before tomorrow.” Even more important is what happens afterwards: do not reward late-night replies or treat permanent availability as evidence of commitment. The general rule: people watch what leaders do more closely than what they declare. If your personal style is not meant to be the standard for everyone else, you need to actively mark the boundary between your own habits and the organization’s expectations.
How Empatyzer and Em can help
Empatyzer can help Anna see that employees learn expectations not only from what a leader says, but from what they repeatedly observe. Her profile may support high drive, control and a willingness to respond late, while some team members may have a much stronger need for a clear boundary between work and private time. Before she communicates, Em can suggest going beyond “you don’t have to reply” and adding a behavioral signal: scheduled send, a clear “for tomorrow” label or an agreed response-time norm. At team level, Empatyzer can also show how varied preferences around pace and availability are. Micro-lessons remind leaders that their personal style becomes a model even when they never formally impose it.
Sources
- Howard M. Weiss (1977). Subordinate imitation of supervisor behavior: The role of modeling in organizational socialization. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 19(1), 89-105. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(77)90056-3 10.1016/0030-5073(77)90056-3
- Frank D. Belschak; Deanne N. Den Hartog (2026). When Leaders Act as Role Models of Proactive Behavior. Journal of Business and Psychology, 41(2), 339-354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-025-10060-5 10.1007/s10869-025-10060-5
- Laura M. Giurge; Vanessa K. Bohns (2021). You don’t need to answer right away! Receivers overestimate how quickly senders expect responses to non-urgent work emails. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 167, 114-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.08.002 10.1016/j.obhdp.2021.08.002
- Larissa K. Barber; Alecia M. Santuzzi; Xinyu Hu (2026). Tackling the Problem of Workplace Telepressure: Are Disconnection Policies Helpful?. Group & Organization Management, 51(1), 498-509. https://doi.org/10.1177/10596011231206206 10.1177/10596011231206206
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