If you are a workaholic, then it may complement equally to upkeep your health as a new study says that there are chances you may suffer negative mental and physical health outcomes such as depression, anxiety or sleep disorder.
The study focused on workaholics who usually work for more than seven hours daily or more hours than others per week, including weekends.
The study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that people who are addicted to higher work hours run the risk of facing developing depression twice compared to those who are not workholics or engage themselves less in work hours.
Sleep quality also remained lower among the workholics compared to workers with low risk of work addiction. Among women, it was found that they had almost twice the work addiction risk than men, the researchers said.
"We found that job demands could be the most important factor that can develop work addiction risk. So this factor should be controlled or should be investigated by the organization's manager, for example, HR staff, psychologists," said researcher Morteza Charkhabi from Higher School of Economics in Russia.
Job Demand-Control-Support model
For the study, the team focused on showing the extent of work addiction risk and its association with the perception of work, including nature of the job, job demands and job control and mental health in four job categories suggested by Karasek's model or Job Demand-Control-Support model (JDCS).
The JDCS model assumes four various work environments or four quadrants in which workers may experience a different level of job demands and job control -- passive, low-strain, active, and tense/job-strain. Job control involves the extent to which an employee feels control over doing work.
The researchers surveyed 187 out of 1,580 (11.8 per cent) French workers who agreed to participate in a cross-sectional study. They were divided based on their occupational groups and investigated the link between work addiction risk and mental and physical health outcomes.
The results show that high job demands at work are strongly associated with work addiction risk but the job control level does not play the same role. The prevalence of work addiction risk is higher for active and high-strain workers than for passive and low-strain workers, found the study.
