This study explored workers engagement in involuntary cognitive intentionality leading to their circumvention of structured and routinized activities at the workplace. Guided by Bedny and Karwowski’s postulation that activities of individuals are realized by goal-directed actions, informed either by mental or motor conscious processes, as objects of the cognitive psychology of skills and performances, qualitative data was collected from documented interactions between graduate students engaged in research work and their supervisor, and analyzed morphologically to understand the significance of workers involuntary cognitive intentionality in different work setting. It was found that individuals assigned consciously designed and assigned structured activity in work-settings can think that they know how to do such activities better, and even understand everything about how to do the activity properly in their minds. It is concluded that workers involuntary cognitive intentionality makes them circumvent consciously designed and assigned routinized structured activity, yielding outcomes that deviate from expectations. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.