Abstract
With nearly a fifth of the workforce potentially suffering from workaholism, our understanding of how workaholism manifests and potentially inhibits well-being and health improving processes is still limited. In the current study, we examined the relationship between workaholism and mindfulness to inform future research on the relations between specific components of these constructs. We hypothesized that all workaholism dimensions would significantly negatively correlate with all mindfulness facets and explored the relative importance of each workaholism dimension in the prediction of mindfulness facets. Results based on a sample of 206 full-time workers living in the United States provided partial support for our hypothesis. Approximately half of the correlations between workaholism dimensions and mindfulness facets were statistically significant. Hierarchical multiple regression and relative weights analysis revealed the cognitive and motivational dimensions of workaholism were significantly related to four of the five mindfulness facets (all except describing), with the motivational dimension exhibiting positive relationships with the mindfulness facets. The emotional dimension was significantly related to only the nonjudging of inner experiences facet of mindfulness. Future directions for identifying aspects of workaholism that may be problematic for experiencing mindfulness are discussed. Future studies should address temporal and causal relationships between workaholism and mindfulness.
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Notes
Total percentage is greater than 100 because individuals were instructed to select more than one race if applicable.
An anonymous reviewer suggested we examine these relationships using a Bonferroni adjustment. After accounting for this adjustment, only one of the 20 correlations (observing facet of mindfulness and the cognitive dimension of workaholism) were significant after using a Bonferroni adjustment. We ultimately decided to report our findings without the Bonferroni adjustment given the large debate on which corrections to apply, with many suggesting the Bonferroni adjustment is too strict (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995; Cabin & Mitchell, 2000; Nakagawa, 2004; Perneger, 1998).
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Howard, G., Smith, R., Haynes, N. et al. Being Mindful about Workaholism: Associations Between Dimensions of Workaholism and Mindfulness. Occup Health Sci 6, 295–311 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41542-022-00113-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41542-022-00113-z