Understanding workaholism: about the role of affect and cognitions

Abstract

Work plays an important role in people's lives. An average person spends more time to work than to other activities. However, some individuals work significantly harder than others. This could be because they have high financial needs, want to get a job promotion, or just love their job. A different reason for some employees to work hard is that they feel a strong inner drive. This type of work motivation – called workaholism- seems to be associated with low levels of recovery and high levels of burnout. These negative consequences for employer and employee highlight the need for understanding and preventing workaholism. Nevertheless, little is known about the psychological mechanism that underlies workaholism and therefore how to counteract it. It is likely that cognitive factors play an important role in the development and maintenance of workaholism. Furthermore, emotions may also fuel compulsive hard work. Therefore, in the current dissertation, we use the Mood as Input hypothesis, which is a framework that integrates both cognitive and affective components, for explaining workaholism. The aim of the dissertation is to examine the role of emotions and cognitions in workaholism using different types of survey methods. Altogether, five chapters of the dissertation describe the results of these studies. In the second-last chapter, we give an overview of the state of the art of workaholism interventions. In the same chapter, we present the protocol of an online training program, which is based on our study results and designed to reduce compulsive work behavior based on the principles of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.