Workaholism

Definitional Issues

Although the term workaholism has become commonplace, unfortunately, there has been little empirical research (and consensus) examining what it means when someone is referred to as a workaholic. The modest amount of existing research has been done in a fragmentary manner; without a common definition, it becomes challenging to develop a holistic picture of workaholism. Definitional issues pertaining to workaholism are summarized in the following text.

A commonly held perspective is that workaholism is simply an extreme form of job involvement. Although the two constructs have been considered synonymous in the practitioner literature, job involvement is clearly distinct from workaholism in that job involvement has an attitudinal component regarding work, whereas workaholism refers to behavioral patterns and an overall outlook on work. High job involvement does not necessarily relate to workaholism in that workers might be highly engaged in their jobs and consider work as a key element in their lives; but they may not be workaholics (e.g., they can still leave work at the end of an eight-hour day and not think about it until returning to work the next day). Hence, workaholism is not merely an extreme case of job involvement.

In an attempt to define workaholism, some researchers have placed a quantitative requirement on its borders in that the total number of hours worked per week determines workaholic tendencies. Surprisingly, the literature has generally shown that hours worked alone do not indicate a workaholic. Many external reasons, such as the need for money or the organizational climate (i.e., overall atmosphere of the organization), may account for the long work hours. Therefore, perhaps workaholics are (in part) those individuals who are intrinsically motivated to work long hours because of an inability to disengage from work.

Other researchers have highlighted the opposite end of the continuum such as attitudes and value-based characteristics of workaholism. These researchers conceptualize workaholism in terms of the attitude of the worker in regard to the job including enthusiasm, commitment, and involvement. Another emergent body of literature has defined workaholism as consisting of three behavioral tendencies:

• 1.
  Spending discretionary time in work activities
• 2.
  Thinking about work when not at work
• 3.
  Working beyond organizational or economic requirements

Despite the plethora of definitions considered to describe workaholism, Janet Spence and Ann Robbins's instrument is by far the most frequently used self-report measure of workaholism. Similar to other recent conceptualizations of workaholism, their scale consists of three factors that constitute

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