A new survey might explain why climbing the corporate ladder has lost some of its appeal, especially among younger employees
More than half of U.S. workers would say no to a promotion, even one with a higher salary, if it meant answering messages after the workday ends.
According to a finding from a survey of 13,742 working adults across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Europe, published in August 2026. The survey, conducted by Hint App, found that 58% said they would decline a promotion tied to being reachable outside normal hours. Sixty-one percent named the feeling that work is never fully finished as the single biggest downside of moving up, and 64% said promotions come with unspoken rules nobody puts in writing, things like answering emails at night, staying reachable on weekends, or always having your phone nearby.
Workers between 18 and 34 felt this most acutely, with 68% saying they had little interest in managing people if it meant giving up their work-life boundaries.
A handful of countries have already tried to legislate away this kind of after-hours pressure. France established a legal right to disconnect back in 2017, and the policy has since spread to other countries, though the U.S. still has no federal equivalent.
Ellen Ernst Kossek, the Basil S. Turner Distinguished Professor Emerita of Management at Purdue University in Indiana, whose research focuses on workplace flexibility, technology, and work-life boundaries, said the findings reflect a deeper economic disillusionment among younger workers.
"I think this new generation is saying, I value my personal time, and the economy sucks. They're not taking care of me. I don't have long-term job security," Kossek said.
Beth Livingston, assistant professor in management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business in Iowa, said the finding points to something employers often get wrong.
"I think there's a misunderstanding by a lot of people about what workers want from their jobs, and I think that's a problem when we focus only on monetary benefits," Livingston said.
Autonomy outweighs the title
That misunderstanding, according to Livingston, largely comes down to control. She pointed to autonomy as the psychological factor that most consistently predicts job satisfaction and turnover.
"People want to feel like they have control over the work that they do. That's been true across generations for decades and decades. People, and this is particularly true in the United States but true everywhere, don't like being micromanaged. They don't like being controlled, and those incursions of technology into people's home time often feel like control," Livingston said.
That pattern isn't unique to this survey. Recent research comparing well-being across remote, hybrid, and onsite work found that employees with more control over when and where they worked reported higher well-being, with one researcher noting that flexibility itself can signal trust from an employer.
Kossek sees that same need for control playing out on a larger, generational scale. She traces it to the collapse of what was once an implicit 20 or 25-year contract between employer and employee, fair treatment, job security, and a reasonable workload in exchange for hard work.
"The pace of work is increasing with AI and the information overload from email," she said. "We haven't really redesigned work to be the modern work of the 21st century."
The cost of staying connected
Constant connectivity carries a real cost of its own. Teleworkers in the U.S. largely say the arrangement helps them balance work and personal life, according to Pew Research Center, yet Kossek's own research suggests the same technology that enables flexibility also erodes attention.
"Even if you think it's good for you, we've all been on vacations or at a dinner party with somebody, and we're looking at our phone, but we're not fully there. Constant connectivity means our attention span is shifted. It's hard to focus," Kossek said.
That inability to switch off carries a specific psychological cost, one Kossek has studied directly in her boundary management research.
"Certainly, getting up in the middle of the night to answer work emails or texts, or even think about it, leads to what's called after-hours rumination," Kossek said.
Livingston traced part of the tension to unclear expectations rather than technology itself. When employees don't know what earns them recognition, she said, they stop trusting a policy that tells them to disconnect, and that mistrust is where burnout tends to take hold.
"They don't know what's getting promoted, they don't know what gets them appreciation and bonuses, and they don't understand the expectations. They're going to say, I don't know, is this a test?" Livingston said.
That same dynamic shows up in recent reporting on whether employees feel comfortable talking to HR about mental health, which found trust, not policy language, is what actually determines whether workers open up.
Managers set the tone
That ambiguity often starts with how managers themselves behave. Management behavior is one of the clearest levers employers have for setting boundary expectations. Kossek's research on boundary management inside organizations found that the most senior person in a group sets the norm for everyone below them.
"The person who sets the boundary management culture is the most senior person in the group. If the vice president or CEO has this style, it's going to trickle down," Kossek said.
Senior employees, according to Livingston, rarely face the same pressure to always be reachable that junior staff do.
"If you're a high-level manager, you often have more autonomy over your job than you think you do. You'll say things like, I work all the time, and that's not untrue, but your assistant isn't setting you a meeting for a time you're not available. You still have that control in a way that your entry-level person does not," Livingston said.
Practical fixes over blanket bans
Neither researcher recommended a strict cutoff, like banning messages after 5 p.m., calling that too rigid given how much people's home lives vary. Instead, Kossek pointed to a simpler fix: letting teams set their own norms around response times.
"One of the things is for workgroups to talk about response times for email. It might be, in teams, I sent an email at 5:30 because I like to pick up my kid at school at 3:30, but I don't expect you to respond till tomorrow," Kossek said.
That kind of specificity, paired with clearer performance standards, is what makes disconnecting feel safe rather than risky. For Livingston, it all comes back to autonomy, and what taking it away signals to employees.
"When you take autonomy away from people, it feels like a lack of trust, and that's one of the worst things you can do to build a positive culture at work," Livingston said.
