Worker maliciously complies with boss' email causes company to not get paid for weeks.

I'm a big proponent of not doing more than you're paid for. If you do more, you need to ask for a raise. If you don't, then the money you save or the profits you bring in for the organization will only fill the bellies of the greed at the top.

On a popular Reddit thread in the Malicious Compliance, a loyal admin employee goes above and beyond their job description for no extra money and then gets told to stay in their lane, only for the company to suffer.

They write:

So, I work for a construction company as an inventory admin. My job is to schedule counts of our warehouse and input the numbers they give me for inventory. Then try to see the problem when the numbers on the last and current counts don’t add up. There is a little more to it, but I will not bore you with the specifics.

The problem with this job is that there is less work when you have been doing it long enough and are good at it. In the beginning, when counting one rack out of 60 racks of material would take a few days, it was okay because I was always busy. But now that everything is in order, the warehouse can be counted in three days. This leaves me bored most of the time.