Same Involvement, Different Reasons: How Personality Factors and Organizations Contribute to Heavy Work Investment

Greta Mazzetti, Dina Guglielmi and Wilmar B. Schaufeli
Additional contact information
Greta Mazzetti: Department of Educational Science, University of Bologna, Via Filippo Re, 6-40126 Bologna, Italy
Dina Guglielmi: Department of Educational Science, University of Bologna, Via Filippo Re, 6-40126 Bologna, Italy
Wilmar B. Schaufeli: Research Unit Occupational & Organizational Psychology and Professional Learning, KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 22, 1-19

Abstract: The academic literature has drawn a clear distinction between a positive form (i.e., work engagement) and a negative form (i.e., workaholism) of heavy work investment (HWI). Nevertheless, the different weight of individual and situational factors contributing to their development was not thoroughly explored. This study aims to investigate the role of individual variables (i.e., obsessive–compulsive traits, achievement orientation, perfectionism, and conscientiousness) and situational factors (i.e., job demands and overwork climate) regarding engagement and workaholism simultaneously. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 523 Italian employees. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that overwork climate and job demands were conversely related to engagement and workaholism, with job demand reporting the strongest association with workaholism. Furthermore, fear of failure was the only individual factor showing a significant and opposite relationship with workaholism and engagement. In contrast, perfectionism was positively associated with both forms of HWI. These results shed light on the potential effectiveness of intervention strategies focused on the employees and organizations in preventing workaholism and promoting engagement.

Keywords: workaholism; engagement; personality; organizational climate; job demands; overwork (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8550/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/22/8550/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:22:p:8550-:d:447008

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().