Annotated Bibliography: Workaholics - Essay Example

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the largest HR and development professional organization in the world defines employee engagement as “a combination of commitment to the organization and its values and a willingness to help out colleagues. It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation…[It] something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract” (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2012). Engaged employees work hard, and they often spend long hours at the workplace.

Hence, they are often mistakenly called as “workaholics”. Unknown to many managers, however, workaholism and employee engagement are two different things. Various articles (Griffiths, 2011; Shifron & Reysen, 2011) look at workaholism as a form of addiction. In his article on workaholism, Mark Griffiths (2011) utilized case studies to show that workaholics exhibit six of the core components of addiction: salience (work becomes the single most important part of an individual’s life), mood modification (work provides as tranquilizing effect), tolerance (workaholics need to work longer hours to achieve the same level of “high”), withdrawal symptoms (workaholic individuals develop physiological responses when they are unable to go to work), conflict (with other individuals and their activities), and relapse (workaholics find it difficult not to revert to their original practice of excessive work, even when they have been pulled out of work for a long time).

Because of his findings, Griffiths believes that more attention should be given to research about workaholism because it creates a new model of addiction that is beyond the biopsychosocial approach. Meanwhile, Rachel Shifron and Rebekah R. Reysen (2011) believes that workaholism is a holistic problem because it can negatively affect the individual, his family and the entire society. Moreover, it is “expressed physically, biologically, psychologically, cognitively, and socially” (Shifron & Reysen, 2011, p. 139), requiring a more holistic understanding of factors that lead to workaholism.

Several researches (Van Beek, Hu, Schaufeli, Taris, & Schreurs, 2012; van Beek, Taris, & Schaufeli, 2011; Van den Broeck et al., 2011; Van Wijhe, Peeters, & Schaufeli, 2011) provide clue as to the differences between workaholism and employee engagement. In Ilona van Beek, Toon W. Taris and Wilmar B. Schaufeli (2011), it was mentioned, “workaholism and work engagement apparently represent different psychological states as exemplified by their associations with different types of outcomes” (p. 469). In general, workaholism leads to negative outcomes for both the individual, his family and the organization as a whole, while work engagement often leads to positive outcomes.

To distinguish between workaholism and employee engagement, the main determinant is usually motivation. In a research conducted among hospital employees (Van Beek et al., 2012), it was discovered that workaholics related with controlled extrinsic motivation (desire to avoid negative emotions, higher need to prove themselves). The same could be said of engaged individuals but perhaps the main difference is that workaholic employees responded to external regulation (avoidance to punishments, the promise of material gain or social