How employee anxiety masquerades as performance, then backfires

Amid rising geopolitical tensions and a murky economic outlook, anxiety is clocking into work, producing false positives in productivity that look like engagement, but are actually a precursor to costly attrition and reputation loss.

Half of the American workforce says that anxiety about the state of the world is hurting their focus, according to a recent Burson study .

And 57% say that anxiety motivates them to work harder.

However, this flash of productivity is a double-edged sword that can produce short-term operational gains but long-term losses at significant material cost.

Among American employees, 34% say anxiety at work undermines loyalty to their employer, and 53% of workers agree that if they knew they could find a position with comparable pay, they would seriously consider leaving.

The data demonstrates that anxious workforces tend to overcompensate with high performance before quitting, rebelling or failing.

In other words, your team may be motivated by fear to work hard, but they may then leave you the first chance they get, imposing a significant downstream cost to ailing reputation.

The average cost of turnover is now $45,236 per position – up nearly $10K year over year – according to a 2026 Express Employment Professionals-Harris Poll survey .

That attrition cost is more than the cost of replacement.

It’s also the negative Glassdoor reviews, the chatter on Blind and the intangible opportunity cost of a former employee telling a rockstar would-be hire to take their skills elsewhere.

This is where the internal discontent bleeds into external conversation, and, thus, dings reputation at a material cost to the business.

Stakeholder view of a company as an employer, what Burson calls the Workplace component of Reputation Capital, is in fact the most underutilized lever of corporate reputation, and companies who best capitalize on workplace can squeeze 11.8% more value out of the $7 trillion Reputation Economy.​ When anxiety builds inside the workforce, compounded by leaders who either add to it or fail to quell it, it does not just affect output, it affects credibility built from the inside out.

87% of Burson study respondents say crisis response reveals more about what a company stands for than ordinary communication​, and 76% say they lose respect for a CEO who changes public positions under the kind of outside pressure that comes with a rapidly swinging geopolitical pendulum.

Leadership guru Brene Brown has long cautioned CEOs that fear-based management has a short shelf-life.