Understanding Work Addiction in Adult Children: The Effect of Addicted Parents and Work Motivation

Abstract

The aim of the study was to examine the mediating role that work motivation plays in the relationship between perceived work addiction of parents and their adult child’s work addiction. The sample was comprised of 537 participants working in different Lithuanian organizations that were selected on the basis of the convenience principle. Data were collected by means of online self-administered questionnaires. To test a mediation model, a structural equation modeling was performed. It was found that perceived work addiction of both mother and father was related to higher levels of work addiction of their adult child. The results also indicated that perceived work addiction of the father was related to increased work addiction in an adult child through higher levels of extrinsic motivation as a partial mediator. The indirect effect of perceived work addiction of the mother (via extrinsic motivation) was not significant. As was expected, the indirect relationship between work addiction in parents and their adult child via intrinsic motivation was not significant. This study demonstrates that integrating both family-related and motivational variables may provide relevant insights into the nature of and mechanisms underlying work addiction and that studies in this field deserve to be further developed in future research.

Childhood Emotional Abuse, Neuroticism, Perfectionism, and Workaholism in an Italian Sample of Young Workers

“…The descriptive statistics and correlations between the variables analyzed in the study are displayed in Table 3. The means identified in the present research align with the values reported in previous studies conducted by Kuo et al [37], Gegieckaite and Kazlauskas [38], Tóth et al [39], and Morkeviči ūt ė and Endriulaitien ė [40]. Considering that the values obtained for kurtosis and skewness of the study variables were far below the suggested +2/−2 range, all variables appeared to be normally distributed [41]; thus, an adequate normal distribution was expected [42].…”

Work addiction and social functioning: A systematic review and five meta-analyses

“…Namely, neither the intimacy, nor the autonomy in the family of origin was related to future work addiction of the offspring. On the other hand, parental work addiction , as rated by the offspring, showed a significant, positive, but weak correlation with the work addiction of the adult child [ 31 , 32 ] and it was true for both mothers and fathers of the offspring. Regarding the contradictory results, it is noteworthy that the former study [ 30 ] presents methodological concerns based on our quality analysis, scoring only 43% (see S2 Table ).…”

Explaining work addiction through perceived behaviors of significant others in a family and organization: Gender differences

“…While most of the previous studies focused on the consequences of work addiction for an individual itself, we shed light on the role of addicted people in explaining work addiction of others. Moreover, although several studies (e.g., Morkevičiūtė & Endriulaitienė, 2022a, 2022b; Chamberlin & Zhang, 2009; Kravina et al ., 2014) investigated the importance of managers' or parents' addictive behaviors for the employees' well‐being, attitudes and behaviors at work, no research comparing the role of both parents' and managers' work addiction within the context of employee work addiction has been carried out yet.…”

“…There are numerous potential explanations of the links between significant others and an individual in terms of work addiction. These include, for instance, external benefits provided by addicted authoritative others for hard work of an individual (Morkevičiūtė & Endriulaitienė, 2022b, 2023a), a narrow understanding of a person's worth when addicted significant others evaluate an individual on account of his/her performance and achievements (Robinson, 2014), over‐responsibility assigned to an individual by addicted significant others (Robinson, 1998, 2014) or even sleep patterns, since poor sleep quality of addicted significant people may control their stress levels, and, ultimately, shape the behavior of those around them (Atroszko & Atroszko, 2020). The following paragraphs introduce the explanatory mechanisms that were most widely discussed in the scientific literature on this field.…”

“…First, this study is the first to examine the role of all main significant others (i.e., both parents and managers) in relation to employees' work addiction. Although some previous studies (e.g., Morkevi ci utė & Endriulaitienė, 2022a, 2022bChamberlin & Zhang, 2009;Kravina et al, 2014) investigated how work addiction of employees was related to work-related behaviors of significant others, studies that compared the role of the authoritative people from different environments (i.e., both a family and organization) are not available. Second, the assumption that the relationship between parents, managers and employees in terms of work addiction might differ depending on gender of an employee, has never been tested before.…”