Psychometric Properties of Heavy Work Investment Measures: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In recent years, the study of heavy work investment (HWI) has been diversifying greatly in the various fields of application in the organizational field, for example, occupational health, human resources, quality at work among others. However, to date, no systematic review has been carried out to examine the methodological quality of the instruments designed to measure HWI. Therefore, the present systematic review examines the psychometric properties of three main measures of HWI: Workaholism Battery (WorkBAT), Work Addiction Risk Test (WART), and Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS). Five electronic databases were systematically searched, selecting psychometric articles. Of the 2621 articles identified, 35 articles met all inclusion criteria published between 1992 and 2019. The findings indicated that most of the articles were focused on reviewing psychometric properties, analyses were conducted from classical test theory, collected validity evidence based on internal structure and relationship with other variables, and reliability of scores was obtained through the internal consistency method. Of the instruments reviewed, the DUWAS is the one with the highest methodological quality. Recommendations are made for future research to address the psychometric study of these instruments based on recent advances in the field of organizational measurement.

Special Issue “Rethinking the Subjective Wellbeing for a New Workplace Scenario”

“…On the other hand, Acosta-Prado et al carried out a literature review on the scales used to measure HWI [28]. This study measures the psychometric properties of the three main HWI scales: Workaholism Battery (WorkBAT), Work Addiction Risk Test (WART) and the Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS).…”

Work addiction in Chinese white-collar workers: the psychometric properties of its measure and its comorbidity with general anxiety in network analysis

“…Since Oates (1971) [ 20 ] initially introduced workaholism (i.e., compulsion or uncontrollable need to work incessantly), the pioneering research of WA has been contributed by four commonly used instruments, including Work Addiction Risk Test (WART) [ 21 ] including its revised form (i.e., Work Addiction Risk Test Revised [WART-R]) [ 22 ], Workaholism Battery (Work-BAT) [ 23 ], and Dutch Work Addiction Scale (DUWAS) [ 24 ]. However, scholars have also raised various concerns in terms of their theoretical bases and factor structures [ 1 ] [ 25 ]. The major criticism is that these measures were largely atheoretical and hence there are potential biases to certain symptoms of addiction.…”

The Test Based on Meta-Analysis on “Does Workaholism Prefer Task Performance or Contextual Performance?”

“…They believed that workaholism was a multidimensional structure, including (1) the inner compulsion to work (motivation); (2) thoughts about work (cognitive); (3) negative emotions when not working (emotional); and (4) excessive work behaviors (behavioral). There is no agreed definition on the concept and dimension division of workaholism, but the key dimensions of working excessively and working compulsively are generally recognized ( Ng et al, 2007 ; Clark et al, 2016 ; Acosta-Prado et al, 2021 ). The article mainly adopts the dimension division of Schaufeli et al (2008) to comprehensively explore the relationship between working excessively (behavioral) and working compulsively (cognitive) and work performance, influenced by a few types of researches on the motivation of workaholism and the general recognition of the positive relationship between the emotion dimension and work performance.…”

“…For example, the WorkBAT-R and JVCT scales come from the WorkBAT scale. Therefore, there are great differences in the measurement tools so it is difficult to keep the same measurement content ( Andreassen et al, 2013 ; Acosta-Prado et al, 2021 ). Second, the dimension divisions are inconsistent.…”