Why Employees Can’t Stop Saving: The Hidden Cost of Workplace Digital Hoarding

Every workplace has them: the colleague whose desktop is a mosaic of hundreds of untitled folders, whose inbox holds years of unanswered threads, whose cloud drive seems to expand without limit. A new study published in Current Psychology argues that this behavior, often dismissed as harmless digital clutter, is in fact a deliberate and meaningful workplace practice with deep psychological roots and significant organizational costs. Researchers Serap Yalçınyiğit and Ayşe Merve Urfa Yılmaz of Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul examined why employees accumulate digital materials and found that the behavior is far more strategic and defensive than previously understood.

The study, based on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, identifies two distinct forms of digital hoarding in organizational settings. The first is reactive digital hoarding, in which employees accumulate files, emails, and documents because they feel the pressure of uncertainty and accountability. The second is proactive digital hoarding, in which persistent digital retention becomes indiscriminate even as it is justified through value-oriented rationales. This distinction matters because the two forms arise from different psychological mechanisms and may require different organizational responses.

Reactive digital hoarding, according to the researchers, functions as a shield. Employees who fear being blamed for missing information, losing evidence of their work, or being unable to defend past decisions respond by keeping everything. In environments characterized by audit cultures and intense accountability pressures, retaining digital traces becomes a form of self-protection. The behavior echoes the concept of the audit society described by sociologist Michael Power, in which rituals of verification dominate organizational life. When workers believe that any document might one day serve as proof of their diligence, deletion feels dangerous and accumulation feels safe.

Proactive digital hoarding operates differently. Here, employees frame their retention practices as valuable, strategic, or forward-looking. They tell themselves that keeping every file preserves institutional knowledge, that the archived material might prove useful someday, or that deleting data would waste resources already invested. Yet the analysis suggests that this retention becomes indiscriminate: the original value-oriented rationale gradually loses contact with what is actually being kept. Files with no conceivable future use pile up alongside genuinely important records, all sheltered under the same legitimizing story of preparedness and resourcefulness.

The theoretical backbone of the study draws on conservation of resources theory, the influential stress framework developed by psychologist Stevan Hobfoll. From this perspective, employees strive to acquire and protect resources they value, including knowledge, evidence of competence, and psychological security. Digital hoarding can be read as a resource-protection strategy: keeping everything is an attempt to conserve informational and defensive resources against future threats. Paradoxically, the strategy consumes other resources, including cognitive capacity, storage infrastructure, and time, creating the very depletion it was meant to prevent.

Psychological ownership also plays a central role. Building on the organizational theory of Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks, the researchers suggest that employees come to feel that digital materials are theirs, even when those materials technically belong to the organization. This sense of possession makes deletion emotionally costly and retention feel natural. Prior research on knowledge hoarding in organizations has shown that individuals often withhold or privately accumulate knowledge for reasons of security and self-interest, and the new study extends this logic into the digital realm, where the marginal cost of keeping one more file is effectively zero.

One of the study’s most striking contributions is its account of how hoarding becomes normalized. The analysis suggests that these practices may become embedded within organizational contexts, passed along as ordinary work habits rather than recognized as problematic behaviors. When everyone keeps everything, keeping everything stops looking like a choice and starts looking like the way work is done. Organizational routines, as scholars such as Feldman and Pentland have argued, are sources of both flexibility and inertia, and digital retention practices appear to follow the same pattern: they calcify into taken-for-granted routines that no one questions.

The costs, however, are real and operate on three levels. At the organizational level, indiscriminate retention strains storage systems, complicates data governance, and can create security and compliance risks when sensitive or outdated information lingers in personal folders. At the cognitive level, accumulating evidence links digital clutter to cognitive failures and reduced work performance; recent studies of employees and students have connected digital hoarding to attentional overload and diminished efficiency. At the ethical level, the study points to tensions surrounding data ownership, privacy, and the appropriate limits of retention, questions that become sharper as workplace digitalization deepens.

The findings arrive amid a growing research conversation about data excess in digital culture. Scholars have documented digital hoarding among academics, students, and general users, and clinicians have reported cases in which digital accumulation mirrors symptoms of hoarding disorder, now recognized in the ICD-11 classification. Earlier work by McKellar, Sillence, Neave, and Briggs established that workplace digital data behaviors span a spectrum from orderly collecting to genuine hoarding, and that organizational culture and policy shape where individuals land on that spectrum. The new study adds motivational texture to that picture by showing that hoarding is not a single behavior but a family of practices with defensive and strategic variants.

By reconceptualizing digital hoarding as a day-to-day workplace practice rather than an individual pathology, the study reframes the problem for managers and information governance professionals. If reactive hoarding is driven by uncertainty and accountability pressure, then clearer retention policies, fairer blame cultures, and better record-keeping systems may do more good than exhortations to declutter. If proactive hoarding is sustained by value-oriented rationales that have drifted from reality, then organizations may need to help employees distinguish between data with genuine future value and digital sediment. Either way, the message is clear: the cost of the shield is being paid, in storage, attention, and ethics, whether organizations notice it or not.

Subject of Research: Reactive and proactive digital hoarding behavior among workplace employees

Article Title: The cost of a shield: reactive and proactive digital hoarding in the workplace

Article References: Yalçınyiğit, S., & Urfa Yılmaz, A. M. (2026). The cost of a shield: reactive and proactive digital hoarding in the workplace. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1600. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10145-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10145-1

Keywords: digital hoarding, workplace digitalization, conservation of resources, psychological ownership, reflexive thematic analysis, organizational behavior, knowledge hoarding, technostress, data governance, digital ethics, qualitative research, organizational routines