Can Employees Overlead Themselves? The Self-Leadership Overload Paradox in High-Pressure Service and Knowledge Work

Self-leadership is increasingly important in service and knowledge-intensive work, yet sustained self-regulation may also create hidden psychological costs. This study introduces self-leadership overload (SLO) as a distinct self-regulatory strain state and examines whether it emerges nonlinearly, whether the self-leadership–SLO association is stronger under high work pressure, and whether SLO shows indirect associations with employee outcomes through work rumination. A two-wave survey of 408 full-time employees across seven service and knowledge-intensive sectors was analyzed using scale-development procedures, iterative PLS-SEM, two-stage nonlinear and moderation models, bootstrapped indirect-effect analysis, incremental-validity tests, and supplementary robustness checks. Self-leadership was positively associated with work happiness and sustainable performance, while its quadratic terms for these outcomes were nonsignificant. By contrast, the quadratic self-leadership–SLO term was positive and significant, indicating a progressively stronger association with overload at higher levels of self-leadership, and work pressure strengthened this association. SLO was associated with lower work happiness and sustainable performance and higher burnout and turnover intention; significant indirect associations through work rumination were observed for all four outcomes. SLO also explained additional variance beyond demographic and employment controls, conventional self-leadership, work pressure, and organizational and personal resources (ΔR2 = 0.049–0.123). General organizational resources did not show the hypothesized buffering pattern, whereas health-oriented self-care was negatively associated with overload. The findings refine the self-leadership paradox by showing that a beneficial self-regulatory capability can coexist with an escalating internal burden without a corresponding direct curvilinear downturn in positive outcomes. The study contributes a theoretically bounded and empirically differentiated SLO construct and highlights workload boundaries, recovery, and health-oriented self-care as important conditions for sustainable self-leadership.