Employees often draw meaning from personal experiences and contributions in their work, particularly when engaging in organizational activities that align with their personal identity or values. However, recent empirical findings have demonstrated how meaningful work can also have a negative effect on employee’s well-being as employees feel so invested in their work, they push themselves beyond their limits resulting in strain and susceptibility to burnout. I use a recently developed framework to understand this “double edged” role of meaningful work by drawing from ideological psychological contracts (iPCs), which are characterized by employees and their employer who are working to contribute to a shared ideology or set of values. The proposed relationships and previous empirical findings, suggest that in response to an iPC breach, employees may actually work harder. Furthermore, these iPC breaches and increases in work effort can result in strain and eventually burnout over time. To provide proof-of-concept and identify deficiencies in these proposed relationships, the present study used a mixed-methods approach, employing thematic analysis with 19 interviews from healthcare workers in a variety of roles as well quantitative measures of iPCs, work effort, strain, and burnout. The themes represent the importance of healthcare values to these employees, define the organizational activities that may be identified as an iPC breach, their affective and behavioural responses to the event of an iPC breach, and lastly, key outcomes that are experienced over time including constructs not previously identified in the model such as decreased self-esteem and identity threat and increased role ambiguity. The quantitative data supported the themes. These findings provide further evidence about the importance of iPCs in healthcare workers and the negative consequences of iPC breach over time.