Workaholics
and their well-being
As
long as you enjoy your work, being a workaholic may not be bad for your
emotional and physical health.
Do you know someone who works every chance they get, feels driven to keep
working hard after others have stopped and even misses their work when on
vacation? These are the characteristics
of a “workaholic”. There are a wide
variety of opinions about workaholism.
Some people view workaholics positively because they believe workaholism
leads to increased productivity. Others,
however, view workaholics negatively because they believe workaholism leads to
unhappiness, health problems and stress for co-workers. Which view is more accurate? To help answer that question a researcher
from the school of business at York University
What was the research about?
A total of 530 MBA graduates, who
had all graduated some time prior to 1996, completed a mailed questionnaire. The questionnaire asked respondents to report
how involved with work they were, how driven they felt to work hard, how much
they enjoyed work, their psychological well-being, any psychosomatic symptoms
experienced in the past year (e.g., headaches), their lifestyle behaviors
(e.g., how often they exercised) and emotional well-being.
Respondents who reported being highly involved with
their work and very driven to work hard were classified as workaholics. Results showed that only workaholics who didn’t enjoy their work reported
poorer psychological well-being, more psychosomatic symptoms, less healthy
lifestyle behaviors and poorer emotional well-being than non-workaholics. Workaholics who did enjoy their work were
just as psychologically and emotionally well as the non-workaholics. Therefore, how much a person enjoys their
work, instead of how hard they work, seems to be the best predictor of their
psychological and emotional well-being.
Why should it matter to me?
When we think someone is a
workaholic we may get a negative impression of that person because we think
they are a slave to their job and suffer the consequences. This impression may be completely
inaccurate. Some workaholics may work so
much just because they enjoy their job a lot, and this doesn’t appear to be such
a bad thing, at least as far as their psychological and emotional health is
concerned.
One important point to keep in mind, however, is
the results of this study are only correlational
and don’t necessarily mean that enjoying work causes that person to experience
better psychological and emotional well-being.
An alternative conclusion could be the reverse; that having better
psychological and emotional well-being causes the person to enjoy their work
more. More research needs to be done
before these two explanations are sorted out, but this study does show there is
an important relationship between work enjoyment and a person’s well-being.
Source: Burke, Ronald J. (2000). Workaholism
in Organizations: Psychological and Physical Well-Being Consequences. Stress Medicine. 16, 11-16.
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