While managers play a critical role in supporting employee wellbeing, prior research suggests that doing so can take a toll on managers themselves. However, we know little about the potential implications of this for employees. Drawing from the leadership-wellbeing literature and social psychological theories of guilt, we propose that manager caring behavior is associated with both positive (vitality) and negative (guilt) employee wellbeing. We find support for these relationships in Study 1 (N = 264) with a time-separated survey. In Study 2, we replicate these findings, and in addition, we examine a negative perceptual response to manager care: employee-rated manager role overload. Drawing on perceptual salience research, we propose that the negative relationship between manager care and employee-rated manager role overload is exacerbated in a team environment where employees fail to care for each other (i.e., a weak caring climate). Study 2 (N = 360) largely supports our hypotheses with multilevel, time-separated field data. The findings suggest that managers should not be expected to “go it alone” to support employee wellbeing because doing so may relate negatively to employee outcomes.

It is widely recognized that caring for employees is a core part of a manager’s  ^[ 1 ]  role (Greenwood & Krol, 2020; Toegel et al., 2013). Manager caring behavior includes actions that reflect genuine care and concern for employees as it relates to their work and nonwork issues. Although research consistently shows that managers who care for their employees engender positive outcomes for employees and their organizations (see reviews from Bavik et al., 2020; Jolly et al., 2021), there are also potential downsides (Barling & Cloutier, 2017). A small body of research has found that managers may put themselves in harm’s way when they care for their employees, as...