The Job Wants All of You: Organisational Greediness and the Erosion of Work–Life Balance among Nigerian Professionals

Purpose This study examines how organisational greediness manifests across employment sectors in Nigeria, what contextual conditions intensify its claims on employees, and what costs those claims impose on workers' wellbeing, relational lives and professional identities. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach was employed, drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 31 Nigerian professionals spanning financial services, healthcare and professional services. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with attention to both semantic content and latent ideological assumptions. Findings Three themes emerged. The normalisation of encroachment revealing how organisational greediness is structurally built through soft expectations, the normalisation of overwork and always-on digital culture rather than through explicit coercion. Nigerian amplifiers identify contextual conditions such as labour market precarity, infrastructural deficit, managerial arbitrariness and gendered burden, which intensify those demands and suppress employees' capacity to resist. Human costs traces the somatic, relational, spiritual and identity-level consequences borne by participants. Practical implications Organisations should treat boundary-setting as a leadership norm rather than a discretionary option, and labour regulators must address the structural amplifiers including wage inadequacy, infrastructural deficit and unenforced working-time protections that make individual resistance structurally impossible. Originality/value This study provides the first qualitative account of organisational greediness as a compounded phenomenon in Nigeria, extending Coser's (1974) theoretical framework to a context defined by labour market precarity, infrastructural instability and limited social protection. It demonstrates that greedy institutions are not equally greedy across contexts, but their intensity is shaped by the structural conditions in which they are embedded.