Citation
Snir, R. and Harpaz, I. (2014), "Guest editorial", Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 29 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-05-2013-0139
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Types of heavy work investment
Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Managerial Psychology, Volume 29, Issue 1
About the Guest Editors
Raphael Snir
(PhD, Behavioral and Management Sciences, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology) serves as a Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Specialization in Human Resources Management at the School of Management and Economics and the School of Behavioral Sciences at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel. He is also a research fellow in the Center for the Study of Organizations and Human Resource Management at Haifa University, Israel. His current research interests include workaholism (among other subtypes of heavy work investment), work/non-work relations, and work meaning and attitudes.
Itzhak Harpaz
(PhD, Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies, University of Minnesota) is Dean of Graduate Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Organizations and Human Resource Management at the University of Haifa, Israel. His current research interests include heavy work investment, workaholism, work values, and the effects of joblessness. He is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications and six books, including The Meaning of Work in Israel: Its Nature and Consequences, and Strategic Human Resource Management.
Some individuals put a considerable amount of time and energy to their work. Such over-commitment has been used to describe the notion of “workaholism. By the term workaholics, Oates (1971) refers to people whose need to work has become so exaggerated that it may constitute a danger to their health, personal happiness, interpersonal relations and social functioning. Since 1995, the number of publications on the topic of workaholism appears to be increasing exponentially (Sussman, 2012).
Snir and Harpaz (2009, 2012), which introduced the concept of Heavy Work Investment (HWI), maintain that both long hours and heavy effort are its core dimensions, and consider workaholism as only one of its subtypes. Using Weiners (1985) attributional framework, Snir and Harpaz (2012) differentiate two major types of HWI, situational and dispositional, each with its own subtypes, as based on the predictors of such an investment. The first major type of HWI is situational, stemming from external (to the person) predictors. In the short term, external predictors, such as basic financial needs (food, accommodation, etc.), job demands, employer/supervisor demands, or organizational culture (e.g. the overtime culture in high-tech organizations and among hospitals physicians), are uncontrollable and stable. Accordingly, they distinguish common subtypes of situational heavy work investors, such as the needy and the employer-directed.
According to Snir and Harpaz (2012), the second major type of HWI is dispositional, stemming from internal (to the person) predictors. They also further distinguish common subtypes of dispositional HWI. For instance, workaholism, as based on an addiction to work (an internal, uncontrollable, and stable predictor), and work devotion as an expression of a passion to work (an internal, controllable, and stable predictor). Work devotion is similar to Spence and Robbinss (1992) concept of work enthusiasm, as well as to the concept of work engagement, which refers to a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption (Schaufeli et al., 2009; Schaufeli et al., 2006). Snir and Harpaz (2012) note, however, that not all possible subtypes of dispositional HWI necessarily revolve around work: they may also stem from non-work avoidance. Examples may be fear of intimacy (an internal, uncontrollable, and stable predictor), and a low preference for leisure (an internal, controllable, and stable predictor).
In total, an estimated 22 percent of the global workforce, or 614.2 million workers, work more than 48 hours per week (Lee et al., 2007). However, the existing literature deals mainly with workaholics and (to a lesser extent) work-devoted investors. The present JMP special issue, which attempts to advance our understanding regarding HWI, includes five contributions, among them four empirical and one theoretical. Authors come from Canada, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, and the US, while the editors of the special issue are from Israel. This spectrum of writers perhaps attests to the global nature of the HWI phenomena.
In the first paper of this special issue, Andreassen, Hetland, and Pallesen present an investigation of the three most commonly used workaholism measures – the Workaholism Battery (WorkBAT), the Work Addiction Risk Test (WART) and the Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS) – in terms of their cross-validation, their temporal stability and their factor structure. The cross-validation showed that the correlations between the scores of the different instruments were too low to conclude that they measure the same construct. The test-retest reliability coefficients for the measures revealed that the scores were quite stable over time. Explorative factor analyses supported a four-factor solution for the WorkBAT and for the WART. A two-factor solution for the DUWAS was found.
The second, third, and forth papers compare between positive and negative predictors and subtypes of dispositional HWI. Houlfort, Philippe, Vallerand, and Ménard conceptually position passion for work as a predictor of HWI. They distinguish between obsessive passion and harmonious passion. Obsessive passion occurs when individuals feel compelled to engage in an activity because of internal contingencies that control them; whereas harmonious passion occurs when individuals have freely accepted an activity as important to them without any contingencies attached to it. Harmonious passion was found to be positively related to positive individual outcomes (higher work satisfaction, lower depression) and organizational outcomes (lower turnover intentions), whereas obsessive passion was positively related to negative consequences (depression and turnover intentions). Furthermore, passion for work was found to be a distinct concept from work motivation as the above findings held even when controlling for work motivation.
van Beek, Taris, Schaufeli, and Brenninkmeijer investigated the motivational correlates of two HWI subtypes: workaholism and work engagement. Building on Higginss (1997, 1998) regulatory focus theory, they revealed that workaholism was primarily and positively associated with having a prevention focus, whereas work engagement was primarily and positively associated with having a promotion focus. Furthermore, workaholism was negatively related to job satisfaction and job performance, and positively related to turnover intention; whereas work engagement was positively associated with job satisfaction and job performance, and negatively associated with turnover intention.
Bakker, Shimazu, Demerouti, Shimada, and Kawakami examine how work engagement and workaholism are related to family satisfaction as reported by employees and their intimate partner. Work engagement was found to be positively related to work-family facilitation, which, in turn, predicted own and partners family satisfaction, also one year later. In contrast, workaholism showed a positive relationship with work-family conflict, and had an indirect negative effect on own and partners family satisfaction. The structural relationships between the variables from husbands to wives were similar to those from wives to husbands.
In the fifth paper of this special issue, Astakhova and Hogue apply a bio-psycho-social model to develop an integrated typology of HWI. They provide a theoretically grounded typology of HWI that distinguishes three general types of HWI (Workaholic HWI, Situational HWI, and Pseudo HWI) and nine corresponding HWI subtypes. Die-hard, self-sacrificer, egotist and activist are the workaholic subtypes; opportunist, periodic avant-garde, capricious, and fickle are the situational subtypes; and the faker is the pseudo subtype. They suggest that various subtypes of HWI differ in nature according to the joint interplay of varying strengths of biological, psychological, and social influences. Finally, they also demonstrate how the typology can be applied to predict unique individual and organizational outcomes associated with each HWI subtype.
The above mentioned five contributions illustrate the development of HWI research. First, the interest in HWI is international in scope. Second, according to a cross-validation of the three most used workaholism measures – the WorkBAT, the WART, and the DUWAS – one cannot use them interchangeably (Andreassen, Hetland, and Pallesen). Third, three empirical studies (Houlfort et al.; van Beek et al.; and Bakker et al.) present a pattern of findings which supports past research (e.g. Bonebright et al., 2000; Burke and Fiksenbaum, 2009a, b; Shimazu, 2012) – workaholism is associated with negative results, whereas work devotion/enthusiasm/engagement is associated with positive results. Forth, three empirical studies (Andreassen, Hetland, and Pallesen; Houlfort et al.; and Bakker et al.) include longitudinal research. Fifth, according to Astakhova and Hogue, the differentiation of dispositional and situational HWI subtypes might be more diverse than initially suggested by Snir and Harpaz (2012). Moreover, there might by also a Pseudo HWI subtype – an idea which suits adequately with the phenomenon of impression management at the workplace described by Giacalone and Rosenfeld (1989).
Research on HWI is still in its infancy. The present collection constitutes a fresh and promising step in the understanding of HWI. Nevertheless, writing on HWI still needs additional development in its model building, conceptualization, and empirical research. A greater agreement among researchers concerning the differentiation between the various HWI subtypes should also facilitate future research.
Snir and Harpaz (2012) claim that the study of situational investors (i.e. the needy and the employer-directed), regardless of the specific terminology used to name them (e.g. reluctant hard workers: Buelens and Poelmans, 2004; the conscripts: Drago et al., 2006; unhappy workaholics: Friedman and Lobel, 2003; and the over-employed: Golden, 2006), is relatively scarce. In light of indications as to the considerable portion of full-time workers who want to work fewer hours (Reynolds, 2004), and of low earners, long work hours employees (Greenstein, 2000), further research on situational heavy work investors is clearly needed.
Raphael Snir and Itzhak Harpaz
Guest Editors
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