The costs of working too hard: relationships between workaholism, job demands, and prosocial citizenship behavior

Despite the relatively intuitive link between working hard and achievements at work, results from empirical studies tend to characterize workaholics more often as hard workers rather than smart workers. Indeed, the link between workaholism and job performance is not obvious. In this paper, we investigated the link between workaholism and a core component of contextual performance, namely, prosocial organizational citizenship behavior (P-OCB). More in detail, we posited a mediational model in which workaholic tendencies negatively predicted P-OCB indirectly through an increased perception of job demands. This model was tested using longitudinal data from a sample of 85 police officers assessed once every two weeks for three months. Results from multilevel structural equation analyses demonstrated the model’s good fit and corroborated the mediated effect. All in all, our results point to an organizational cost of workaholism, represented by its aversive impact on P-OCB.