Association between workaholism and perceived health

Abstract

Workaholic employees face a greater amount of difficulties due to an inner compulsion to work excessively hard. As a result, they are prone to several physical and psychological problems, and at the same time, they are less productive and efficient at work. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that workaholism would be related to ill-health. A total number of 345 Serbian employees (116 male), age between 20 and 64 years (M= 41.81, SD= 10.44), filled out following questionnaires: The Dutch Work Addiction Scale, Work Burnout Scale, and Scale of mental and physical health. The Regression analyses indicated that people with higher level of workaholism report higher level of physical complaints (r = .316, p < .001), anxiety (r = .174, p < .001), depressive reactions (r = .243, p < .001), disruption of social functioning (r= .185, p< .001), exhaustion (r = .267, p < .001), work burnout (r = .398, p < .001), and lower level of perceived professional efficacy (r = -.257, p < .001). Our study showed that workaholism and well-being are related, confirming our hypothesis and supporting earlier findings that workaholics are less healthy than others.