Work addiction among employees and self-employed workers: An investigation based on the Italian version of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale

Abstract

The increasing interest in work addiction is connected to recent changes in the work culture and work habits. Despite this interest, knowledge pertaining to this phenomenon and measures to assess it are still limited. This study aims to contribute by examining the psychometric features of the Italian version of the Bergen Work Addiction Scale, a unidimensional scale based on the perspective of addiction. The research method consisted in two steps: in the first cross-sectional study, a convenience sample of 1,035 workers filled in a self-report questionnaire; the second step was a two-wave longitudinal study that involved a convenience sample of 292 workers. Results confirmed the psychometric properties of the scale across employees and self-employed groups. Moreover, results showed a significantly higher level of work addiction among self-employed workers than employees. This study provides support for the evaluation of workaholism in the Italian context among different kind of professions.

Work Addiction and Depression, Anxiety, and Stress: the Mediating Role of Food Addiction Among Lebanese Young Adult Workers

“…Our findings also suggested that the BWAS in its Arabic version has good reliability, with a Cronbach's alpha value of 0.811 for the total scores, corroborating the good psychometric characteristics of the original version of the BWAS which yielded alpha values of 0.80-0.84 (Andreassen et al, 2012a, b). Similar evidence of adequate reliability was also found in the Danish (α = 0.83) (Lichtenstein et al, 2019), Italian (α = 0.82) (Molino et al, 2021), Polish (α = 0.84) , and Turkish (α = 0.76) (Denizci Nazlıgül et al, 2021) validation studies. Overall, the present findings reinforce the ability of the Arabic version of the BWAS to evaluate the seven core elements of WA throughout a unidimensional measure, practical, and easy-to-use to detect WA in Arabic-speaking workers.…”

“…As we expected, the confirmatory factor analysis was able to replicate the 7-item one-factor structure of the BWAS found by Andreassen et al (2012a, b) in their original validation work in Western samples. Consistently, the unidimensional structure was also replicated in other validation works in Denmark (Lichtenstein et al, 2019), Turkey (Denizci Nazlıgül et al, 2021), and Italy (Molino et al, 2021), whereas a Polish study failed to support the original one-factor solution of the BWAS . Our findings also suggested that the BWAS in its Arabic version has good reliability, with a Cronbach's alpha value of 0.811 for the total scores, corroborating the good psychometric characteristics of the original version of the BWAS which yielded alpha values of 0.80-0.84 (Andreassen et al, 2012a, b).…”

“…More recently, Andreassen et al developed and validated the Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS), which is aimed at exploring the core behavioral addiction symptoms (Andreassen et al, 2012a, b), and enables prevalence estimates to be obtained using an established cutoff for WA (Andreassen et al, 2012a, b). The BWAS has been translated and validated in different languages, including Danish (Lichtenstein et al, 2019), Polish , Turkish (Denizci Nazlıgül et al, 2021), and Italian (Molino et al, 2021). Although the BWAS has been recognized as the most recommended measure of WA for future research (Lichtenstein et al, 2019), no Arabic version is available as far as authors are aware.…”

“…Previous studies having reported prevalence rates of WA using the BWAS found substantial differences across countries. For instance, estimates of WA prevalence were 6.6 % in Denmark (Lichtenstein et al, 2019), 8.3% in Norway (Andreassen et al, 2014), 6.0-10.3% in Italy (Molino et al, 2021), 17.4% in Poland ), 18.1% in Turkey (Denizci Nazlıgül et al, 2021, and 20.6% in Hungary (Orosz et al, 2016). Cross-cultural research highlighted that individuals from Eastern countries (i.e., China and Japan) experienced higher rates of WA than those from Western countries (i.e., Finland, the Netherlands, and Spain) (Hu et al, 2014).…”

Workaholism and quality of work-life: a psychosocial pathway to brain-drain syndrome

“…Typically, individuals work long hours due to personal economic constraints or financial needs or excessive tasks and customer demands (workload). Ordinarily, it is not uncommon, in peculiar sectors, to discover predominantly established workaholics as a result of building up career growth for so many employees across human organisations(Molino et al, 2023). Hence, in light of the foregoing conceptual explanations and available data, this study put forward these hypotheses: H4.…”