The advance of technology brings the flourish and vigor in economy to global market. It also changes the way we do business. Every company is struggle to gain the competitive advantage. Peter Drucker (1999), a management master, points out that in the 21st century, the most valuable assets of an organization are knowledge workers and the productivity of knowledge workers.
Last ten years, high-tech industries become the main force in Taiwan. However, there are some attributes under this industry that make employees hard to differentiate between work and life, for example, short period of product life cycle, nonstop product line and so on. The researches from Fassel(1990), Schaef & Fassel(1988) indicate that some companies are workaholics itself. Schneider(1987) thought that people will stay in a company suitable to himself/herself longer due to attraction-selection-attrition theory. Many researches pointed out that workaholics are more involved in work than other workers.(Fassel, 1990; Scott et al., 1997; Spence & Robbins, 1992). Therefore, maximizing the efforts from workaholics is an challenge.
In this study, workaholism is defined as an independent variable. Other variables like health, work-family conflict and job performance are as independent variables. Besides, personal attributes and job characteristics are defined as antecedents. This study will take 136 engineers in high-tech industry to examine the effect of workaholism on other dependent variables, like health, work-family conflict and job performance.
The findings in this study are as follows:
1. After using factor analysis to examine three dimensions of wokaholism from Spence & Robbins(1992), the result points out that job involvement is an unstable factor, but work enjoyment and driveness are applicable to this study.
2. The hypothesis that there is a significant effect of health on work enjoyment and driveness is partly supported. Driveness is a risk factor related to health because it has a negativ effect on general health, social function and mental health. Besides, work enjoyment has a positive effect to general health, vitality, social function and mental health.
3. The hypothesis that there is a significant effect of work-family conflict on work enjoyment and driveness is supported. Work enjoyment has a negative effect on work-family conflict. However, driveness has a positive effect on work-family conflict.
4. The hypothesis that there is a significant effect of job performance on work enjoyment and driveness is partly supported. Work enjoyment has a positive effect on task and contextual performance. However, driveness has a positive effect on contextual performance.
5. The hypothesis that there are significant differences in work enjoyment and driveness among personal attributes is partly supported. No significant difference was found in work enjoyment among personal attributes. In addition, there is a significant difference for marital status in driveness. The married workers experience a higher level of driveness than unmarried workers.
6. The hypothesis that there is a significant effect of job characteristics in work enjoyment and driveness is partly supported. The result indicates that time control is positively related to work enjoyment. Monitoring demand and product responsibility are positively related to driveness. Method control is negatively related to driveness.
7. After using cluster analysis, three types of workaholics are identified in this study. They are enthusiastic workers, disenchanted workers and relaxed workers.¡@Among three types of workaholics, enthusiastic workers have a better health condition, job performance and a lower level in work-family conflict than other two types of workaholics. Furthermore, enthusiastic workers have a higher level in time control and method control than disenchanted workers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0625107-172130 |
| Date | 25 June 2007 |
| Creators | Su, Hui-chun |
| Contributors | Liang-Chih Huang, Shyh-jer Chen, Jin-Feng Uen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0625107-172130 |
| Rights | withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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