APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY: AN INTERNATIONAL REVIEW, 2008, 57 (2), 173–203
doi: 10.1111/j.1464-0597.2007.00285.x

Workaholism, Burnout, and Work Engagement:
Three of a Kind or Three Different Kinds of
Employee Well-being?

SCHAUFELI
Original
WORKAHOLISM,
ArticleETAssociation
AL.
BURNOUT,ENGAGEMENT
Blackwell
Oxford,Applied
APPS©
0269-994X
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56
International
2007UK
Psychology
PublishingLtd
for AND
AppliedPsychology, 2007

Wilmar B. Schaufeli*
Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Toon W. Taris
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Willem van Rhenen
ArboNed, Utrecht, The Netherlands
The present study investigated in a sample of 587 telecom managers whether
workaholism, burnout, and work engagement—the supposed antipode of
burnout— can be distinguished empirically. These three concepts were measured with existing, validated multi-dimensional questionnaires. Structural
equation modeling revealed that a slightly modiﬁed version of the hypothesised model that assumed three distinct yet correlated constructs—burnout,
engagement, and workaholism—ﬁtted the data best. Multiple regression analyses
revealed that these three concepts retained unique hypothesised patterns ofrelationships with variables from ﬁve clusters representing (1) long working
hours, (2) job characteristics, (3) work outcomes, (4) quality of social relationships, and (5) perceived health, respectively. In sum, our analyses provided
converging evidence that workaholism, burnout, and engagement are threedifferent kinds of employee well-being rather than three of a kind.
La présente étude examine auprès d’un échantillon de 587 cadres des télécommunications la question de savoir si l’addiction au travail, le burnout etl’engagement au travail—supposé l’inverse du burnout—peuvent être distingués
empiriquement. Ces trois concepts sont mesurés à partir de questionnaires
multi-dimensionnels existants et validés. La modélisation d’équation structurale
indique qu’une version légèrement modifiée du modèle testé selon lequel leburnout, l’engagement au travail et l’addiction au travail sont trois formes
distinctes bien que corrélées du bien-être, rend mieux compte des résultats.
Des analyses de régression multiples montrent que ces trois concepts renvoient* Address for correspondence: Wilmar B. Schaufeli, Utrecht University, Department of
Psychology, P.O. Box 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands. Email: W.Schaufeli@fss.uu.nl© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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à des modèles de relations supposés uniques entre les variables des cinq
groupes suivants: 1) le nombre d’heures travaillées, 2) les caractéristiques dutravail, 3) les résultats du travail, 4) la qualité des relations sociales et 5) lasanté perçue. En conclusion, les analyses montrent de façon convergente quel’addiction au travail, le burnout et l’engagement au travail sont trois formes
différentes de bien-être des employés plutôt que trois facettes du bien-être.

INTRODUCTION
This article attempts to demonstrate the empirical distinctiveness of workaholism, burnout, and work engagement by examining their interrelationships(internal validity) as well as their relationships with other variables (external
validity). In order to be considered three different kinds of employee wellbeing factors rather than three of a kind, workaholism, burnout, and work
engagement should not constitute one single common factor and the three
concepts should relate differently—and as predicted—to other variables suchas excess working time, job characteristics, work outcomes, quality of social
relationships, and perceived health.
The issue of empirical distinctiveness is particularly important becausesome conceptual confusion exists about the nature of these three overlapping
kinds of employee well-being. For instance, the leading model of workaholism(Spence & Robbins, 1992) assumes three underlying dimensions, the so-called“workaholic-triad”, consisting of work involvement, drive, and work enjoyment.
Different combinations of these three elements are assumed to produce six types
of “workaholism”. One of these types represents “real workaholism”, whereas
two others seem to overlap with burnout and work engagement, respectively.
More speciﬁcally, according to Spence and Robbins (1992), “real workaholics”
are high in involvement, high in drive, and low in enjoyment, whereas “workenthusiasts” are high in involvement and enjoyment, and low in drive (thusresembling engaged workers), and “disenchanted workers” are low in involvement and enjoyment, and high in drive (thus resembling burned-out workers).
We strongly believe that subsuming different types of employee well-being
under the same heading is not a very good strategy because it blurs the meaning of workaholism and adds to the conceptual confusion. Rather, we argue
that workaholism, burnout, and work engagement are conceptually andempirically distinct. To our knowledge, so far no study has included thesethree kinds of employee well-being simultaneously so that an empirical testof their distinctiveness is still outstanding. Only one study has included bothburnout and workaholism (Burke & Matthiesen, 2004), but rather thaninvestigating the empirical distinctiveness of workaholism and burnout thisstudy compared levels of burnout across the types of workaholism as proposedby Spence and Robbins (1992). Indeed, it was found that “disenchanted workers”
scored highest on the two most prominent burnout dimensions (i.e. exhaustionand cynicism), whereas no signiﬁcant difference between the six types of© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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175

workaholism was observed on the remaining inefﬁcacy dimension. This result
lends credit to our assertion that “disenchanted” workers are high in burnout.
Accordingly, the study of Burke and Matthiesen (2004) underscores the importance of investigating the empirical distinctiveness of workaholism and burnout.

WORKAHOLISM, BURNOUT, AND WORK ENGAGEMENT(INTERNAL VALIDITY)
The term “workaholism” was coined by Oates (1971), who describes it as“. . . the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly” (p. 11).
This early description entails two core elements which return in most laterdeﬁnitions of workaholism: working excessively hard and the existence of astrong, irresistible inner drive (cf. McMillan, O’Driscoll, & Burke, 2003).
The former points to the fact that workaholics tend to allocate an exceptional amount of time to work and that they work beyond what is reasonably expected to meet organisational or economic requirements. The latterrecognises that workaholics persistently and frequently think about work,
even when not working, which suggests that workaholics are “obsessed”
with their work. In fact, these two elements—that represent the behavioral
and cognitive component of workaholism, respectively—refer to the very
origin of the term workaholism which was meant to correspond to alcoholism (Oates, 1986). We agree with Porter (1996, p. 71), who calls on students
of workaholism to “. . . return to the origin of the term as a starting point
for future research”. She posits that workaholism should be interpreted as
an addiction, that is, as excessive and persistent behavior with harmful consequences, thus excluding views that consider workaholism a positive state(e.g. Machlowitz, 1980; Scott, Moore, & Miceli, 1997; Spence & Robbins, 1992).
In our view, workaholics work harder than their job prescriptions require
and they put much more effort into their jobs than is expected by the people
with whom or for whom they work, and in doing so they neglect their life
outside their job. Typically, they work so hard out of an inner compulsion,need, or drive, and not because of external factors such as ﬁnancial rewards,
career perspectives, organisational culture, or poor marriage.
Burnout is a metaphor that is commonly used to describe a state ofmental weariness. Although there is some discussion about the nature of
burnout (see Schaufeli & Taris, 2005), the most widely used conceptualisation originates from Maslach (1993), who describes burnout as a threedimensional construct that consists of: (1) exhaustion (i.e. the depletion or
draining of mental resources); (2) cynicism (i.e. indifference or a distant
attitude towards one’s job); and (3) lack of professional efﬁcacy (i.e. thetendency to evaluate one’s work performance negatively, resulting in feelings of insufﬁciency and poor job-related self-esteem). It has been estimatedthat over 90 per cent of the studies on burnout use the Maslach Burnout© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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Inventory that is based on this three-dimensional deﬁnition (Schaufeli &Enzmann, 1998, p. 71). The fact that studies on burnout and workaholism
are virtually lacking is all the more remarkable because already 20 years ago
it was suggested that workaholism may act as a the root cause of burnout
since excessively and frantically working employees use up their mental
resources, leaving them depleted and “burned out” (Maslach, 1986). Clearly,
this contention implies that workaholism and burnout are different constructs that can also be discriminated empirically.
The concept of work engagement emerged from burnout research, namely
as an attempt to cover the entire spectrum running from employee unwellbeing (burnout) to employee well-being (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001).
Unlike those who suffer from burnout, engaged employees have a sense ofenergetic and effective connection with their work activities and they see
themselves as able to deal well with the demands of their job. Morespeciﬁcally, Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, and Bakker (2002a) deﬁnework engagement as a positive, fulﬁlling, work-related state of mind that ischaracterised by: (1) vigor (i.e. high levels of energy and mental resilience
while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistencealso in the face of difﬁculties); (2) dedication (i.e. a sense of signiﬁcance,
enthusiasm, inspiration, pride, and challenge); and (3) absorption (i.e. being
fully concentrated and engrossed in one’s work, whereby time passes quickly
and one has difﬁculties with detaching oneself from work). Absorption comesclose to what has been called “ﬂow” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)—a state of
optimal experience—although ﬂow refers to short-term peak experiences
instead of a more pervasive and persistent state of mind, as is the case withabsorption. Work engagement and burnout are moderately negatively related,with correlations typically ranging from −.30 to −.65 (for an overview see
Schaufeli & Salanova, in press). Recently, it was found that exhaustion andvigor as well as cynicism and dedication each span a dimension that might
be labeled activation and identiﬁcation, respectively (González-Romá, Schaufeli,
Bakker, & Lloret, 2006). So far, the relationship between work engagement
and workaholism has not been studied. However, interviews with engaged
employees who scored high on vigor, dedication, and absorption suggest thatthey are not addicted to work (Schaufeli, Taris, Le Blanc, Peeters, Bakker, &De Jonge, 2001). Unlike workaholics, they enjoy doing things outside work,
they do not feel guilty when not working, and they do not work hard becauseof a strong and irresistible inner drive but because for them work is fun.

WORKAHOLISM, BURNOUT, AND WORK ENGAGEMENT(EXTERNAL VALIDITY)
In order to assess the external validity of workaholism, burnout, and engagement, their relationships with ﬁve sets of variables are investigated. As can© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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WORKAHOLISM, BURNOUT, AND ENGAGEMENTTABLE 1
Summary of Expected Relationships of Workaholism, Burnout, and WorkEngagement with Other Variables
Workaholism

Burnout

Engagement

+

0

+

+
0
+
−
−

+
_
−
−
−

0
+
+
+
+

Excess working timeJob characteristics
Demands
Recourses
Work outcomes
Social relations
Perceived health

Note: + = positive relationship; − = negative relationship; 0 = no signiﬁcant relationship.

be seen from Table 1, each of the three focal concepts is expected to berelated in a speciﬁc way to the external variables. Below we discuss therelationships that are summarised in Table 1 in greater detail, and formulate
six hypotheses.

Excess Working TimeThe most obvious characteristic of workaholics is that they work beyond
what is required (e.g. Buelens & Poelmans; 2004; Scott et al., 1997). North
American workaholics work on average 50–60 hours per week (Brett &Stroh, 2003), with those who score high on the drive component working
the longest hours (Burke, 1999; Kanai, Wakabayashi, & Fling, 1996; Peiperl& Jones, 2001; Spence & Robbins, 1992; Taris, Schaufeli, & Verhoeven, 2005).
Typically, a positive relationship between working time and burnout isalmost exclusively observed for perceived time pressure and only very occasionally for more objective measures, such as caseload or the number ofworking hours per week (Lee & Ashforth, 1996; Schaufeli & Enzmann,
1998, p. 82). It appears from a large representative sample of the Dutch fulltime workforce that engagement is associated with overwork (Beckers, Van
der Linden, Smulders, Kompier, Van Veldhoven, & Van Yperen, 2004).
Hence, it is expected that workaholism and engagement are positively
related to excess working time, whereas no relationship is expected withburnout (Hypothesis 1).

Job Characteristics
In their attempts to continue working, workaholics may go as far as toactively create more work for themselves; for instance, by making projects© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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more complicated than necessary or by refusing to delegate work (Machlowitz,1980). As expected, strong positive relationships were found between
workaholism and job demands such as work overload (Kanai et al., 1996;
Kanai & Wakabayashi, 2001). Taris et al. (2005) showed that the relationship between workaholism and exhaustion was partly mediated by perceived
job demands: workaholics experience high job demands, which in turn are
related to exhaustion. Most studies on burnout have included job characteristics because these are considered to be the root cause of the syndrome. The
most convincing and consistent ﬁndings were obtained with job demands—
notably work overload—and with poor resources, such as lack of social support
from co-workers and superiors, and lack of job control. For instance, a metaanalysis by Lee and Ashforth (1996) showed that exhaustion shared 42 percent of its variance with work overload, whereas 14 per cent of the variancein exhaustion overlapped with support from supervisors and 5 per cent withsupport from co-workers. Their meta-study also showed that—dependingon the dimension—job control accounted for 3–10 per cent of the varianceof burnout. Using discriminant analysis, Demerouti, Bakker, De Jonge,
Janssen, and Schaufeli (2001) found that levels of job demands and job
control were predicted by two discriminant functions that were labeled“burnout” and “engagement”. In a similar vein, Sonnentag (2003) observed
a signiﬁcant positive relationship between engagement and method control,
whereas engagement was unrelated with job demands. These ﬁndings corroborate Schaufeli and Bakker’s (2004) ﬁnding that engagement was related
to job resources (e.g. social support from colleagues) but not to job demands,
whereas burnout was related to both. Positive associations between engagement and rewarding co-worker and supervisor relations were also found ina recent study by May, Gilson, and Harter (2004).
In sum, we expect that workaholism and burnout are positively related tojob demands, whereas engagement is unrelated to demands (Hypothesis 2a).
In addition, we expect that work engagement is positively related with job
resources (i.e. job control and social support), whereas burnout is negatively
related with job resources and workaholism is unrelated to job resources(Hypothesis 2b).

Work Outcomes
It seems that workaholics might be working harder than others but do notreceive more rewards for their efforts (Burke, 2001). This is contingent with
the idea that workaholics are motivated by a strong inner drive rather thanby external motivators (Spence & Robbins, 1992). Nevertheless, it appears
that a weak positive relationship exists between workaholism, and job
satisfaction and organisational commitment (Burke, 1999; Burke & Koskal,
2002; Burke, Richardsen, & Mortinussen, 2004). The major work outcomes© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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179

that have been studied in relation to burnout are job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998, pp. 89–91) computed
meta-correlations based on almost 50 studies and showed that between 5
and 27 per cent of the variance of these two variables was shared withburnout, depending on the dimension studied. Schaufeli and Bakker (2004)
showed that engagement was negatively related to the intention to quit,
which might be interpreted as a proxy of organisational commitment (i.e.
continuance commitment). This meshes well with Schaufeli et al.’s (2001)
qualitative ﬁndings that engaged workers are committed and satisﬁed with
their jobs, as well as with Demerouti et al. (2001), who reported moderate
positive correlations between organisational commitment and all three
engagement dimensions.
Hence, we expect that both workaholism and engagement are positively
related to work outcomes (i.e. job satisfaction and organisational commitment),
whereas burnout is negatively related with these outcomes (Hypothesis 3).

Quality of Social Relationships
If workaholism is a pervasive phenomenon that urges people to spend asmuch time as possible at their jobs at the cost of other activities, workaholics
should differ from non-workaholics as regards the quality of their interpersonal relationships, as well as their social functioning outside work. Previous
research has supported these notions. For instance, levels of marital estrangement are relatively high among workaholics (Robinson, Flowers, & Carroll, 2001),
workaholics experience poorer relational satisfaction than non-workaholics(Burke & Koksal, 2002), and they report poorer social functioning (McMillan& O’Driscoll, 2004). Since burnout is considered a negative mental state, it
is expected to have an adverse impact on home and family life (the so-called
negative spill-over hypothesis; see Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998, p. 88). Althoughassociations have been found between employee burnout on the one handand marital dissatisfaction and family stress on the other, the causal direction is still unclear so that there is no conclusive evidence on negative
spill-over of burnout to private life (Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998, pp. 88–89).
The already mentioned qualitative study on work engagement (Schaufeli
et al., 2001) suggested that engaged employees do not neglect their social
life outside work; rather, they spend time on socialising, hobbies, and workas volunteers. This agrees with recent ﬁndings of Grzywacz and Marks (2000)
that suggest a positive spill-over effect from work to private life: having a
fulﬁlling job has a positive impact on family life. In a similar vein, Montgomery, Peeters, Schaufeli, and Den Ouden (2003) found that employees whotake the positive feelings from their work home—or vice versa—exhibit
higher levels of engagement compared to those where there is no positive
cross-over between both life domains.
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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Thus, we expect that both workaholism and burnout are related to poorsocial functioning, whereas engagement is related to good social functioning(Hypothesis 4).

Perceived HealthPrevious research has shown that working long hours is associated withelevated levels of strain and ill-health (see Van der Hulst, 2003, for a review),
presumably because workers who work hard have insufﬁcient opportunity
to recover from their excessive efforts (Sonnentag, 2003). Consistent with suchreasoning, workaholics report relatively high levels of job strain and healthcomplaints (Burke, 1999, 2000; Burke et al., 2004; Kanai et al., 1996; McMillan
et al., 2003; Spence & Robbins, 1992; Taris et al., 2005). Despite this rather
compelling evidence, a recent study concluded that “it appears that workaholism may be less toxic to personal health and well-being than at ﬁrst
thought” (McMillan & O’Driscoll, 2004, p. 509). Research has revealed positive
relationships between burnout and various mental and physical health problems(for an overview see Shirom, Melamed, Toker, Berliner, & Shapira, 2005).
This is particularly true for distress, depression, and psychosomatic complaints.
Typically, the exhaustion component of burnout is most strongly related tohealth problems, for instance, sharing up to 40 per cent of its variance withdepression and 45 per cent with self-reported psychosomatic complaints(Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998, pp. 86–89). So far, only two studies included
work engagement and perceived health (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004; Hakanen,
Bakker, & Schaufeli, 2006). The model that was tested successfully in bothstudies assumed that burnout was negatively related to health, whereas
engagement was unrelated to health problems. However, unlike the latent
job engagement construct, vigor and dedication showed weak to moderate
positive correlations with perceived health. In other words, there is limited
evidence that at least two aspects of engagement are positively related toperceived health. This agrees with the qualitative study of Schaufeli et al.
(2001) that suggests that engaged employees enjoy good mental health.
Therefore, we expect that perceived health is negatively related to bothworkaholism and burnout, and positively related to work engagement(Hypothesis 5).

THE PRESENT STUDYInternal Validity
Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), three different models aretested. The ﬁrst model (M1) assumes that all scales that assess workaholism,
burnout, and work engagement load on one common factor (“general well© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

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181

being”) and, therefore, that the three focal concepts cannot be differentiated.
It has been argued that positive and negative affect (Clark & Watson, 1991)
and positive and negative well-being (Huppert & Whittington, 2003) constitute two independent dimensions. Therefore, a second model (M2) was
speciﬁed that assumes two negatively correlated factors that include all
positively worded scales and all negatively worded scales, respectively. Finally,
the third model (M3) assumes three correlated factors that represent workaholism, burnout, and work engagement.

External Validity
The six hypotheses that have been formulated before can be summarised asfollows: workaholism is related to excess working time, job demands, positive
work outcomes, poor quality of social relations and health problems; burnout
is unrelated to excess working time, but is related to job demands, lack ofresources, poor work outcomes, poor quality of social relationships, andhealth problems; and ﬁnally, work engagement is related to working excess
time, job resources, positive work outcomes, good quality of social relations,and health. Accordingly, we expect that each type of employee well-being isrelated in a unique way to each of the ﬁve sets of variables (see also Table 1).

METHOD

SampleIn total, 854 middle managers and executives of a Dutch telecom company
were invited to participate in the study that was part of a recurring
employee health and well-being survey (response rate 69%; N = 587). The
majority were men (78%); 86 per cent lived together with a partner; 58 percent held at least a college degree; 2 per cent were aged under 24, 22 percent between 24 and 34, 35 per cent between 35 and 44, 34 per cent between
45 and 54, and 7 per cent were aged over 55 years; 5 per cent were employed
less than one year at the company, 23 per cent between 1 and 5 years, 15
per cent between 6 and 10 years, and 56 per cent over 10 years. On average,
the managers had worked 1.83 years in their current jobs (SD = .75). Thus,
we deal with a typical managerial sample consisting of predominantly
highly educated, experienced, middle-aged, and married men. The telecom
managers in the sample had to effectively manage—in addition to their daily
work—redundancy programs, thereby trying to diminish adverse effects on
their subordinates. Moreover, they had to coach the survivors and thus todeal with fairness issues that were related to redundancies. These managerial
tasks called for social leadership, but most managers had a technical background and had been promoted because they were good at their job.
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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Procedure
All participants received a paper-and-pencil questionnaire with an accompanying letter that explained the purpose of the survey, emphasised voluntary participation, and guaranteed conﬁdentiality. Participants were asked
to ﬁll out the questionnaire and put it back into an envelope that wascollected by the occupational health service of the company.

Instruments
In line with our conceptualisation of workaholism, we operationalised
workaholism in terms of two scales, namely “Working Excessively” (working extremely hard) and “Drive” (being propelled by an inner drive),
representing the behavioral and cognitive components of workaholism,
respectively. These two scales were taken from two frequently usedworkaholism inventories: the Work Addiction Risk Test (WART; Robinson,1999) and the Workaholism Battery (Spence & Robbins, 1992), respectively.
However, the original label of the excess work scale—“Control Tendency”—
is somewhat misleading because most of its items refer to working hard,
without any reference to the underlying motivation, whereas the remaining
items refer to the inability to relax and to feeling guilty when not working.
For that reason we re-labeled this scale Working Excessively. A recent
validity study, using three independent Dutch samples, showed thatthe nine-item excess work scale could be used as a short version of thefull 25-item WART (Taris et al., 2005). In the current study, one item(“It is hard for me to relax when I’m not working”) was eliminatedbecause it proved to be unsound, so that eight items remained. The
eight-item drive scale explicitly refers to the compulsive nature of the underlying motivation to work hard as well as to the compulsiveness of excessive
work behavior. Example items are: “I seem to be in a hurry and racing
against the clock” (working excessively) and “I feel that there’s somethinginside me that drives me to work hard” (drive). Both scales were scoredon a 4-point rating scale, ranging from 1 (“totally disagree”) to 4 (“totallyagree”) and correlated positively (r = .59, p < .001). The internal consistencies (Cronbach’s α) of all scales that are used in the current study arepresented in Table 2.
Burnout. Burnout was assessed with the Dutch version (Schaufeli &Van Dierendonck, 2000) of the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General
Survey (MBI-GS; Schaufeli, Leiter, Maslach, & Jackson, 1996). The
MBI-GS includes three subscales: Exhaustion (ﬁve items), Cynicism(ﬁve items), and Professional Efﬁcacy (six items). All items were scored on
a 7-point frequency rating scale ranging from 0 (“never”) to 6 (“always”).
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

Variable
1. Overwork
2. Overtime (%)
3. Job demands
4. Job control
5. Support co-workers
6. Support supervisor
7. Job satisfaction
8. Org. commitment
9. Negative reactions
10. Impaired soc. func.
11. Distress
12. Depression
13. Anxiety
14. Psychosom. comp.
15. Exhaustion
16. Cynicism
17. Red. prof. efﬁcacy
18. Vigor
19. Dedication
20. Absorption
21. Work excess
22. Drive

M

SD

α

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

4.01
16.93
2.61
3.02
2.38
2.46
2.44
2.41
1.44
1.41
.29
.06
.04
.23
1.28
1.08
4.25
4.33
4.37
3.76
3.01
2.53

1.59
17.04
.41
.42
.36
.47
.57
.60
1.96
1.15
.36
.20
.11
.23
.92
1.02
.82
1.00
1.11
1.01
.68
.73

n.a.
n.a.
.72
.83
.72
.82
.90
.83
.72
.82
.92
.83
.74
.76
.87
.82
.80
.88
.93
.80
.77
.85

–
.55***.26***.32***
.07
.03
.26**
.09*
−.01
.06
.02
−.04
−.08*
−.04
.02
−.05
.20**
.19***.24***.26***.43***.17**–.33***.32***−.04−.08*.25***
.00
−.01
−.02
−.06
−.07
−.10*
−.11*
.00
−.05
.21**
.27***.24**.24**.50***
.08*

–
.16**
−.09*
−.19**
.12**
.02
.08
.11*
.15**
.03
.03
.07
.33***
.07
−.02
.10*
.11*
.24**
.58***.33***

–
.19**
.22**
.62***
.19**
.05
.03
−.17*
−.15*
−.12*
−.11*
−.18**−.37***.53***.41***.59***.38***.22**−.18**–.58***.29***
.25**
−.11*
−.12*
−.20**.14**−.13**−.16**−.15**−.21**.34***.23**.31***.14*−.03−.15**–.40***.33***−.12*−.17**−.19**.08*−.12*−.14**−.27***−.37***.31***.24**.34***
.14*
−.08*
.21**

–
.41***−.11*−.15**−.27***−.21**−.24**−.22**−.22**−.54***.53***.45***.68***.41***
.21**
−.15*

–
−.12*
−.12*
−.15**−.05−.08−.14**−.20**−.45***.31***.30***.42***.28***
.09*
−.01

–
.23**
.24**
.29***
.21**
.16**
.16**
.18**
−.17**
−.08*
−.10*
.03
.05
.24**

WORKAHOLISM, BURNOUT, AND ENGAGEMENT

183© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

TABLE 2Means (M), Standard Deviations (SD), Internal Consistencies (Cronbach’s α),
and Zero-Order Correlations of the Study Variables (N = 587)

184

Variable
1. Overwork
2. Overtime (%)
3. Job demands
4. Job control
5. Support co-workers
6. Support supervisor
7. Job satisfaction
8. Org. commitment
9. Negative reactions
10. Impaired soc. func.
11. Distress
12. Depression
13. Anxiety
14. Psychosom. comp.
15. Exhaustion
16. Cynicism
17. Red. prof. efﬁcacy
18. Vigor
19. Dedication
20. Absorption
21. Work excess
22. Drive

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

–
.56***.40***.37***.48***.48***.28***−.24**−.36***−.23**
−.08*
.12*
.26**

–
.65**
.52***.61***.58***.46***−.34***−.23**−.32***−.12**.11*.39***–.51***.31***.37***.33***−.24**−.25***−.22**
−.08*
−.00
.23**

–
.37***.31***.23**−.21**−.22**−.23**
−.06
−.00
.24

–
.43***.27**−.22**−.27***−.18**−.07.06.30***–.52***−.40***−.48***−.34***−.10*.32***.41***–−.50***.50***−.64***−.34***.07.27***–.66***.68***.45***−.06−.23**–.79***.70***.14*−.12*

Note: * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

19

20

21

–
.72***–.16*.37***–−.12*.20*.59***SCHAUFELI ET AL.

© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
Psychology.

Table 2
Continued

WORKAHOLISM, BURNOUT, AND ENGAGEMENT

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High scores on exhaustion and cynicism and low scores on professional
efﬁcacy are indicative of burnout (i.e. the efﬁcacy items were reversescored). Example items are: “I feel emotionally drained from my work”(exhaustion); “I have become more cynical about whether my work
contributes anything” (cynicism); “At my work, I feel conﬁdent that I am
effective at getting things done” (professional efﬁcacy). Intercorrelations
among the three scales ranged from .40 to .52. The MBI-GS has been
extensively psychometrically validated in the Netherlands and elsewhere(e.g. Bakker, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2002; Schutte, Toppinen, Kalimo, &Schaufeli, 2000).
Work Engagement. Work engagement was assessed with the Utrecht
Work Engagement Scale (UWES; Schaufeli et al., 2002a). The UWES
includes three subscales that reﬂect the underlying dimensions of engagement: Vigor (six items), Dedication (DE; ﬁve items), and Absorption (sixitems). The engagement items were similarly scored as those of the MBI-GS
and inter-correlations among the three scales ranged from .70 to .79. Example
items are: “At my job, I feel strong and vigorous” (vigor); “I am enthusiastic about my job” (dedication); “When I am working, I forget everythingelse around me” (absorption).
Excess Working Time. Time spent at work was measured with twoquestions: “How often do you take work home?” and “How often do you
work at weekends?” (1 = “almost never”, 4 = “almost always”). The answers
on both questions correlated strongly (r = .63, p < .001), so that they wereadded in order to constitute one score: overwork. In addition, an index was
calculated of the percentage of overtime, computed as the number of hours
worked overtime divided by the number of working hours according to
one’s contract, multiplied by 100. The mean percentage of overtime in thissample was 16.9 per cent (SD = 17.0). As expected, overwork and percentage overtime were correlated positively (r = .55, p < .001).
Job Characteristics. Job characteristics were measured with the Job
Content Questionnaire (JCQ; Karasek, Brisson, Kawakami, Houtman, &Bongers, 1998) that includes (1) psychological job demands (nine items);(2) job control (nine items); (3) co-worker support (four items); and (4)supervisor support (four items). All JCQ-items were scored on a 4point rating scale (1 = “completely disagree”, 4 = “completely agree”).
Intercorrelations among the three job resources ranged from .28 to .36(mean r = .33). Example items are: “Do you have to work very fast?” (jobdemands); “Do you have freedom in carrying out your work activities?”(job control); and “If necessary, can you ask your colleagues (supervisor)
for help?” (social support).
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Work Outcomes. Work outcomes were assessed by two self-constructedscales that were based on the Questionnaire on the Experience andEvaluation of Work (QEEW), which is widely used by both Dutch
occupational health services and applied researchers (Van Veldhoven,
De Jonge, Broersen, Kompier, & Meijman, 2002): (1) job satisfaction(seven items: e.g. “I like my job at <name of the company>”) and (2) organisational commitment (four items: e.g. “I like to work for <name of thecompany>”). All items were scored on a 4-point rating scale (1 = “completely disagree”, 4 = “completely agree”). Both outcomes were positively
correlated (r = .41).
Quality of Social Relationships and Social Functioning. This was measured with two self-constructed indicators: negative reactions during thepast week from others outside work and impaired social functioning, orthe extent to which one’s current mental or physical condition impededsocial functioning outside work. Negative reactions were assessed by aneight-item scale (e.g. “Lack of understanding”). Items were scored on a 4point rating scale (1 = “almost never”, 4 = “very often”). Impaired social
functioning was measured by four questions that refer to feeling impairedin: (1) one’s social contacts with one’s family; (2) one’s social contacts
outside the family; (3) one’s recreational activities; (4) performing household chores. All items were scored on a 5-point rating scale (1 = “not at all
impaired”, 5 = “severely impaired”). Impaired social functioning correlated
positively with negative reactions of others (r = .23, p < .01).
Perceived Health. Perceived health was assessed by the FourDimensional Symptom Questionnaire (4DSQ; Terluin, Van Rhenen,
Schaufeli, & de Haan, 2004),1 which consists of four symptom clusters:(1) Distress (16 items); (2) Depression (six items); (3) Anxiety (12 items)and (4) Psychosomatic Complaints (16 items). All 50 items were scoredon a 5-point rating scale (0 = “no”, 5 = “very often”). However, following
the scoring instruction (Terluin et al., 2004), every symptom is recoded
as absent (0 = “no”), doubtfully present (1 = “sometimes”), or present
at a clinically signiﬁcant level (2 = “regularly”/“often”/“very often”). Intercorrelations among the four scales ranged from .31 to .65 (mean r = .41).
Example items are: “Do you feel easily irritated?” (distress); “Do you feelthat everything is meaningless?” (depression); “Do you feel frightened?”(anxiety); “Do you suffer from headaches?” (psychosomatic complaints).
The 4DSQ is frequently used in Dutch primary health care settings to

1

An English version is available from the internet: http://www.emgo.nl/utilities/4DSQ.asp.

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distinguish between psychiatric illness and uncomplicated stress-relateddisorders since its discriminant validity has been convincingly demonstrated(Terluin, 1998).

RESULTSInternal Validity: The Relationship between Burnout,
Work Engagement, and Workaholism
Structural equation modeling methods as implemented by AMOS 5(Arbuckle, 2003) were used to test the ﬁt of the three competing models.
Maximum likelihood estimation methods were used and the input for eachanalysis was the covariance matrix of the items. Missing values (maximum2.5%) were replaced by the series mean. The goodness-of-ﬁt of the models
was evaluated using the χ2 goodness-of-ﬁt statistic and the Root Mean
Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA). However, χ2 is sensitive to sample
size, so that the probability of rejecting a hypothesised model increases whensample size increases, even if the difference between the ﬁtted model and the“true” underlying model is very small. To overcome this problem, the computation of relative goodness-of-ﬁt indices is strongly recommended (Bentler,
1990). Two relative goodness-of-ﬁt indices were computed: the Non-Normed
Fit Index (NNFI) and the Comparative Fit Index (CFI). The latter isparticularly recommended for model comparison purposes (Gofﬁn, 1993).
For both relative-ﬁt indices, as a rule of thumb, values greater than .90 are
considered as indicating a good ﬁt (Byrne, 2001, pp. 79–88), whereas values
smaller than .08 for RMSEA indicate acceptable ﬁt (Cudeck & Browne, 1993).
M1 assumes that all workaholism, burnout, and work engagement scales
load on one common general well-being factor; M2 assumes that the positive scales (Vigor, Dedication, Absorption, Professional Efﬁcacy) and thenegative scales (Exhaustion, Cynicism, Working Excessively, Drive) eachload on a separate factor; M3 assumes a workaholism factor (Working
Excessively, Drive), a burnout factor (Exhaustion, Cynicism, Professional
Efﬁcacy), and an engagement factor (Vigor, Dedication, Absorption). Table 2
presents the correlations between the scales measuring workaholism,
burnout, and work engagement, as well as their means, standard deviations,and internal consistencies.
As revealed by Table 3, M1, M2, and M3 showed a poor ﬁt to the data,with none of the ﬁt-indices meeting their respective criterion for acceptable ﬁt.
Inspection of the so-called Modiﬁcation Indices for M3 revealed that theﬁt of the model could be increased by allowing: (1) the errors of Vigor andExhaustion, and of Cynicism and Dedication to correlate; (2) Professional
Efﬁcacy to load on the latent Work Engagement factor instead of the Burnout
factor; (3) Absorption to load on the latent workaholism factor as well.
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TABLE 3Fit of Models that Specify the Relationship between Workaholism, Burnout, andWork Engagement (N = 587)
Model

χ2

df

RMSEA

NNFI

CFI

M1
M2
M3
M4

821.93716.89533.09193.64

20
19
17
14

.21
.11
.09
.07

.57
.61
.68
.93

.69
.73
.80
.93

Notes: For M1–M4 see text; all χ2, p < .001.

The ﬁrst and the second re-speciﬁcation agreed with previous studies (e.g.
Schaufeli et al., 2002a Schaufeli, Martinez, Marques Pinto, Salanova, &Bakker, 2002b). The third re-speciﬁcation indicated that, obviously, being
absorbed in one’s work is related to workaholism as well (see Discussion).
The revised model (M4) ﬁtted signiﬁcantly better to the data than M3 (Δχ2
(df = 3) = 339.45, p < .001), with RMSEA, NNFI, and CFI meeting theirrespective criteria (see Table 3).
As can be seen from Figure 1, the latent burnout and workaholism factors were positively correlated (r = .53), whereas—as expected—burnout
was negatively correlated with work engagement (r = −.65). In contrast, nosigniﬁcant correlation existed between workaholism and engagement (r =−.04). Moreover, and as mentioned above, the error terms of exhaustion andvigor as well as cynicism and dedication were negatively related. Figure 1
further shows that exhaustion and cynicism, working excessively and drive,and vigor and dedication loaded about equally strongly on burnout, workaholism, and work engagement, respectively. In contrast, professional
efﬁcacy and absorption contributed less to engagement, whereas absorption
contributed even less to workaholism. In sum, instead of the hypothesisedmodel, a more complex revised model with professional efﬁcacy loading on
engagement and absorption having a double loading on both engagement
and workaholism ﬁtted better to the data.

External Validity: Associations between Well-being andOther Variables
The second aim of our study was to test a set of ﬁve hypotheses about therelationships of workaholism, burnout, and work engagement on the one
hand and excessive working time (overwork, percentage overtime), job characteristics (job demands, job control, social support from co-workers andfrom one’s superior), work outcomes (job satisfaction, organisational commitment), quality of social relationships (negative social reactions, impaired© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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FIGURE 1. The relationship between workaholism, burnout, and work
engagement (M4; N = 587).
Note: EX = Exhaustion; CY = Cynicism; PE = Professional Efficacy; VI = Vigor;
DE = Dedication; AB = Absorption; WE = Working Excessively; DR = Drive.

social functioning), and perceived health (distress, depression, anxiety, psychosomatic complaints), on the other hand.
As Table 2 shows, virtually all correlations were in the expected direction.
The only exception was the negative correlation of drive with job satisfaction,
indicating that managers with a strong inner work drive were less satisﬁedwith their jobs. At ﬁrst glance, it seemed that the patterns of correlations ofburnout and drive with the external variables were rather similar, solely withthe exception of excess working time and organisational commitment.
Furthermore, the pattern of correlations of engagement was quite similar to thatof burnout and drive, albeit in the opposite direction. Finally, the patternof correlations of working excessively differed from that of all other scales.
Taken together, this suggests that drive is somewhat similar to the engagement and burnout constructs in terms of its relations with external concepts,
whereas working excessively hard seems to be a rather different concept.
In order to test our hypotheses, a series of eight multiple regression analyses
was conducted, whereby each of the well-being scales was regressed on 17
independent variables. A hierarchical procedure was used, where in the ﬁrst
step age, gender, and level of education were entered in order to control forsocio-demographic characteristics. In the next step the remaining 14 external variables were entered.
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TABLE 4Multiple Regression of Burnout, Engagement, and Workaholism on the Study
Variables (β-values) (N = 587)
Burnout

Excess working time
1. Overwork
2. Overtime (%)
Job characteristics
3. Job demands
4. Job control
5. Support co-workers
6. Support supervisor
Work outcomes
7. Job satisfaction
8. Org. commitment
Social relations
9. Negative reactions
10. Impaired soc. funct.
Perceived health
11. Distress
12. Depression
13. Anxiety
14. Psychosom. complaints
Explained variance (R2)Work engagement

Workaholism

EX

CY

rPE

VI

DE

AB

WE

DR

−.04
−.05

.01
−.01

.07
.04

.02
.15**

.04
.03

.07
.05

.24**
.15**

.01
.15**

.26** .04
.02
−.03
−.02
−.27**−.01−.04−.21**−.09* −.15** −.04

.09*
.11*
.11*
.01

.09*
.21**
.16**
.01

.22** .46** .23**.21** −.03−.17**
.08
−.02
.00
.06
−.00
−.10*

−.11** −.31** −.19**−.06−.20** −.10*

.16**
.11*

.39**
.16**

.15**
.16**

.01
.10**

.03
.11**

.03
.17**

−.05
−.01
−.19** −.10**

.07
.08

.07
.07

.18**
.02

.06
.00

.36** .30**
.03
.11*
.02
.11**
.09* −.06
.48
.48

.07
.09*

.16** −.41** −.18** −.08.03−.13* −.04
−.02
.05
−.06
.00
−.09
.07
.13** .13** .07
.43
.40
.57
.23

.07
.17**
−.09
−.00
.03
.06
.09** .15**.48.32

Notes: EX = Exhaustion; CY = Cynicism; rPE = Reduced Professional Efﬁcacy; VI = Vigor;
DE = Dedication; AB = Absorption; WE = Working Excessively ; DR = Drive; * p < .05; ** p < .01.
All β-values are controlled for the inﬂuence of socio-demographics (age, gender, and level of education).

It appeared that the employee’s socio-biographical background did notplay an important role: only cynicism was weakly but signiﬁcantly related
to level of education (β = .08; p < .05). Therefore, the results of the ﬁrst stepof the regression analyses are not presented in Table 4. Although the sizesof most β-weights were small to moderate (see Table 4), the proportionof explained variance was substantial and ranged from .32 (drive) to .57(dedication), with the exception of absorption (23% explained variance).
H1 assumes that workaholism and work engagement are positively
related to excess working time, whereas burnout is not signiﬁcantly related
to excess working time. Consistent with H1, Table 4 reveals that vigor,
working excessively, and drive were positively related to the proportion of
overtime, and that working excessively was additionally related to overwork. As expected, none of the burnout scales was related to excess working
time (H1 partly conﬁrmed).
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H2a, assuming that workaholism and burnout are positively related tojob demands, whereas work engagement is not signiﬁcantly related to job
demands, was also partially conﬁrmed. As expected, exhaustion, working
excessively, and drive were positively related to job demands, but against
expectations all three engagement scales showed similar, albeit somewhat
weaker relationships with job demands (H2a partly conﬁrmed).
H2b assumes that burnout is negatively related to resources, whereas
work engagement is positively related to resources and workaholism is not
related to job resources. More speciﬁcally, lack of supervisor support was
related to exhaustion and cynicism, whereas job control and/or co-worker
support was positively related to vigor, dedication, and absorption, andnegatively related to reduced personal efﬁcacy. This means that H2b waspartially conﬁrmed, with the exception of drive which was negatively related
to job control and supervisor support.
H3 assumes that burnout is negatively related to job satisfaction andorganisational commitment, whereas work engagement and workaholism
are positively related to these work outcomes. All engagement scales werepositively related to both work outcomes, whereas cynicism and reduced
professional efﬁcacy were negatively related to both. In addition, and against
expectations, both workaholism scales were positively related to commitment and exhaustion was negatively related to satisfaction (H3 partly
conﬁrmed).
H4 assumes that workaholism and burnout are related to poor social
relationships, whereas work engagement is related to good quality relationships. As expected, exhaustion, reduced personal efﬁcacy, and drive werepositively related to negative reactions of others or to impaired social functioning, whereas vigor and dedication were negatively related to the latter(H4 partly conﬁrmed).
Finally, H5 assumes that workaholism and burnout are related to poor
perceived health, whereas engagement is related to good health. As
expected, burnout and workaholism were positively related to perceived illhealth—particularly to distress and psychosomatic complaints—whereas
vigor and dedication were negatively related to distress and/or depression.
However, psychosomatic complaints were—against expectations—positively
related to vigor and dedication. This was remarkable since the correlations
between perceived ill-health and engagement were negative (see Table 4),
which suggests that this unexpected result is a statistical artifact that should
not be interpreted further (H5 partly conﬁrmed).
To recapitulate: workaholism was related to excess working time (overwork and percentage overtime), poor quality of social relations (negative
reactions of others), health problems (distress and psychosomatic complaints),
job demands, and positive work outcomes (organisational commitment).
However, the pattern of associations differs between both workaholism© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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scales: compared to working excessively, drive was more strongly associatedwith negative aspects (i.e. negative social reactions outside work, psychosomatic complaints, and distress).
Burnout was not related to excess working time but to impaired social
functioning, health problems (distress, depression, anxiety, and psychosomatic health complaints), job demands, lack of resources (lack of job control, and lack of support from co-workers and supervisor), and negative
work outcomes (job dissatisfaction and low organisational commitment).
Furthermore, exhaustion was particularly associated with distress and job
demands, cynicism was particularly associated with distress and job dissatisfaction, and reduced professional efﬁcacy was particularly associated withlacking job resources (job control and support from co-workers).
Work engagement was related to working excess time (percentage overtime),
unimpaired social functioning, health, job resources (job control and co-worker
support), and positive work outcomes (job satisfaction and poor organisational
commitment). However, unexpectedly, all three components of engagement
were positively related to job demands. Obviously, engaged managers worked
in demanding jobs, but unlike their colleagues who score high on burnout
or workaholism, they experienced good mental health.
In conclusion, workaholism, burnout, and engagement are differently
related to ﬁve sets of variables in ways that were by and large predicted byour hypotheses.

DISCUSSION
Are workaholism, burnout, and work engagement three of a kind, or are they
three different kinds of employee well-being factors that can be distinguishedempirically? We sought to answer this question using a typical managerial
sample of highly educated and experienced telecom managers. Although in our
sample workaholism, burnout, and engagement can be separated empirically,
the relationships among the three constructs are more complex than expected.
It seems that burnout and engagement act as each other’s opposites, whereas
workaholism shares some features with both. This general conclusion isbased on the interrelationships among the constituting components of thethree focal concepts (internal validity), as well as on the relationships ofthese three concepts with ﬁve sets of external variables (external validity).

Internal Validity
The best-ﬁtting model indicates that workaholism, burnout, and work
engagement are correlated constructs (see Figure 1). As expected, burnout
and engagement are negatively correlated, whereas burnout and workaholism are positively correlated. The former is consistent with other recent© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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studies (see Schaufeli & Salanova, in press). The latter agrees with thecontention that workaholism may act as a root cause of burnout (Maslach,
1986; Porter, 2001) in the sense that workaholics are “burning up” their mental
energy resources. However, the pattern of relationships between the eightsubscales that constitute workaholism, burnout, and engagement is slightly
more complex than expected.
First, it appeared that absorption not only loads on work engagement (asexpected) but also on workaholism, albeit that the latter factor loading isrelatively weak (see Figure 1). This double loading of absorption might be
explained by the fact that workaholism is characterised by a reluctance todisengage from work (McMillan et al., 2001) and by a compulsory indulgence in work (Porter, 1996). Such descriptions clearly overlap with absorption that is characterised by being fully immersed in one’s work and having
difﬁculties detaching from it (Schaufeli et al., 2002a). Thus, our analyses
suggest that workaholism and work engagement overlap as far as feelingsof being absorbed in one’s work are concerned. However, the underlying
motivation for being completely immersed in one’s work differs: in the caseof engagement this motivation is intrinsic (work is fun), whereas in the caseof workaholism it is compulsive (being driven to work).
Second, professional efﬁcacy loaded on the “wrong” factor; that is, insteadof loading on the latent burnout factor (as expected), professional efﬁcacy
loaded on work engagement. This has been observed in other studies as wellusing data from the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal (e.g. Schaufeli et al.,2002a, 2002b; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). It cannot be completely ruled outthat this ﬁnding reﬂects an artifact resulting from answering bias because all
engagement and professional efﬁcacy items are positively worded, whereas
all exhaustion and cynicism items are negatively worded. This would call for
future research that instead of a positively worded professional efﬁcacy scale
includes a negatively worded inefﬁcacy scale. For instance, Bouman, Te Brake,and Hoogstraten (2002) demonstrated that positively rephrasing the professional efﬁcacy items dramatically increases correlations with the other two
burnout scales. Based on this ﬁnding one could speculate that, compared to
efﬁcacy, correlations of inefﬁcacy with engagement might be lower. However,M2—that assumes that the positively worded items and the negatively
worded items load on two separate factors—did not ﬁt the data, which argues
against such an artifact. On the other hand, a two-dimensional burnout factor
agrees with Green, Walkey, and Taylor (1991), who called exhaustion andcynicism “the core of burnout”. Also this agrees with cumulating evidence thatpoints to the divergent role that lack of professional efﬁcacy plays compared
to exhaustion and cynicism. For instance, a series of studies of Leiter andhis colleagues shows that efﬁcacy develops largely independently from bothother core burnout dimensions (Leiter, 1993). In a similar vein, the resultsof a meta-analysis conﬁrm the independent role of professional efﬁcacy, as© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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compared to exhaustion and cynicism (Lee & Ashforth, 1996). Moreover,an extended engagement factor is in line with Maslach and Leiter (1997),
who have argued that energy (i.e. vigor), involvement (i.e. dedication), andefﬁcacy should be considered the constituting elements of engagement. In
contrast to Maslach and Leiter (1997), we added absorption as anotherdistinct engagement component (Schaufeli et al., 2002a), but obviously, ourresults suggest that absorption as well as efﬁcacy may be subsumed under abroader heading of engagement.
Third, it appeared that the errors of exhaustion and vigor and of cynicism
and dedication were correlated. Despite the danger of chance capitalisation(MacCallum, Roznowski, & Necowitz, 1992) we decided to include these
correlated error terms in our re-speciﬁed model (M4) because both correlated
error terms have been found in previous research (e.g. Schaufeli et al., 2002a,
2002b; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004) and they can be interpreted straightforwardly. Thus, exhaustion and vigor, as well as cynicism and dedication, spana dimension that has been labeled activity and identiﬁcation, respectively(González-Romá et al., 2006). Obviously, part of the initial error varianceis common and might be explained by each of these two dimensions.
In conclusion, psychometrically speaking workaholism, burnout, and work
engagement can be discriminated empirically. Instead of one undifferentiated,common employee well-being factor (M1; see Table 3), we uncovered amore complex multi-faceted structure that differed slightly from the hypothesised model. This multi-faceted structure agrees with other models ofwell-being that distinguish between various dimensions (Ryff & Keyes, 1995;
Warr, 1994). Hence, rather than being a unitary concept, well-being differentiates into various components. In addition, the fact that the ﬁt of thealternative model with one positive and one negative factor (M2; see Table 3)
was inferior rules out a possible artifact due to the wording of the items.

External Validity
What about the relationships of workaholism, burnout, and work engagement with other variables? Burnout and engagement produced highly similar—
yet reversed—patterns of correlations with ﬁve clusters of variables representing excess work, job characteristics, work outcomes, social relations,and perceived health (see Table 2). This similarity supports the notion that,conceptually speaking, burnout and engagement act as each other’s opposites (Maslach et al., 2001). To a somewhat lesser degree, the pattern ofcorrelations of the drive component of workaholism is similar to that of theburnout and engagement components. In contrast, the work excess component does not overlap with any other component of employee well-being,
including drive. This might be caused by its narrow operationalisation interms of excess work behavior, whereas all remaining components are affective© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 International Association of Applied
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or cognitive in nature. Working excessively—as operationalised by our scale—is about working hard, neither taking into account how one feels about it,
nor what are the underlying reasons.
The speciﬁc proﬁles of the three concepts that were speciﬁed in Hypotheses 1 to 5 can be summarised as follows. Managers high on burnout arecharacterised exclusively by negative features; they suffer from healthproblems, their social functioning is impaired, and they work in demanding
jobs with poor resources and poor outcomes. Although these managers
experience high job demands, they do not work long hours. Compared toworkaholics and engaged managers, those who score high on burnout
are too tired to work hard and too cynical to feel committed. In contrast,
managers high on work engagement are almost exclusively characterisedby positive features: they enjoy good mental health, their social functioning
is smooth, and they work in resourceful jobs with positive outcomes. They
also work long hours. Finally, managers high on workaholism work hard
and are characterised by similar negative features as their colleagues whoscore high on burnout, but additionally—like engaged managers—they feel
committed to the organisation as well. So far, results agreed with our
hypotheses. It should be noted, however, that the sizes of most relationships were small to moderate (see Tables 2 and 4). Nevertheless, the total
amount of variance that was explained by the eight scales that assess workaholism, burnout, and work engagement was quite high (mean = 42%; range
23–57%).
Although all hypotheses were at least partly conﬁrmed, there was also one
notable unexpected ﬁnding: workaholism is unexpectedly associated withlack of job resources; that is, with poor job control and lack of supervisory
support. This suggests that workaholics work in unfavorable psychosocial
job environments that might inhibit growth, development, and learning(Karasek & Theorell, 1990). Nevertheless, they work excessively hard. Obviously, unlike engaged workers, who also work hard but in more resourcefuljobs (Demerouti et al., 2001; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004), workaholics are notpropelled to do so because they work in an encouraging psychosocial job
environment. This is supported by Brett and Stroh (2003), who found that
American managers who worked 61 plus hours a week do not do so becauseof extrinsic rewards. So, it can be speculated that instead of a favorable
external job environment a strong inner drive elicits workaholism, which isparticularly true for “perfectionist workaholics” who have a very strong
desire to be in control (Scott et al., 1997).
In conclusion, despite one somewhat unexpected ﬁnding, it seems
that workaholism, burnout, and work engagement each show a uniquepattern of relationships with variables representing working long hours,
job characteristics, work outcomes, social relationships, and perceived
health.
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Implications
Our results have at least two implications for the conceptualisation andmeasurement of employee well-being. First, our ﬁndings mesh with accumulating evidence that burnout and engagement are each constituted by twocore dimensions: exhaustion and cynicism, and vigor and dedication,
respectively (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004; Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, &Ebbinghaus, 2002; Hakanen et al., 2006). Rather than being a componentof burnout, professional efﬁcacy seems to be a component of engagement,
while absorption is perhaps not a unique feature of work engagement.
Hence, the complex interrelationships between workaholism, burnout, andengagement (see Figure 1) could possibly be reduced by excluding professional efﬁcacy and absorption as indicators of burnout and engagement,
respectively. An additional argument for excluding these two components isthat with their removal virtually no loss of information occurs in terms of
relationships of the (reduced) burnout and engagement concepts with theﬁve sets of variables (see Table 4). That is, professional efﬁcacy and absorption are not uniquely related to each of the ﬁve sets of variables as compared
to both other components of burnout and engagement, respectively.
Second, our results make a strong case for combining work excess anddrive into the concept of workaholism since both components are substantively correlated (r = .51) and partly overlap as far as their relationships
with the ﬁve sets of variables are concerned. That is, they share a common
core but each component also has its unique contribution. Both components
are similarly related to percentage overtime, job demands, organisational
commitment, and psychosomatic complaints (the common core). But whereas
the work excess component is most strongly and almost exclusively related
to indicators of working hard (i.e. percentage overtime, overwork, job
demands), the drive component is also related to negative features such as
poor job resources, distress, and poor social relations (the unique contribution). Hence, rather than constituting two mutually exclusive concepts, bothcomponents of workaholism complement each other. This underscores theimportance of using a combination of both hard work (a behavioral indicator)and strong inner drive (a cognitive indicator) to assess workaholism.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research
All data are based on self-reports which means that the magnitudes of theeffects that we reported may have been biased due to common method
variance or the wish to answer consistently (Conway, 2002). Unfortunately,
we cannot test the strength of this type of variance, but several studies (e.g.
Semmer, Zapf, & Greif, 1996; Spector, 1992) have indicated that common
method variance is not as troublesome as one might expect in studies such
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as the current one. In a somewhat similar vein, it can be argued that
personality traits such as negative affectivity (NA; Watson & Clark, 1984)
might act as a third variable that is related to the three types of well-being
as well as to the ﬁve sets of independent variables. Research, however, justiﬁes
the omission of this potential confounder in research using self-reports. For
instance, Moyle (1995), in a study of possible inﬂuences that NA could haveon the stressor–strain relationship, concluded that NA cannot generally
account for the observed correlations between work environment measuresand strains. Similarly, Schonﬁeld (1996) concluded that NA does not overly
distort self-report measures and strain outcomes. Spector, Zapf, Chen, andFrese (2000) go one step further by warning not to “throw out the baby withthe bath water” by controlling for NA in job stress research. Nevertheless,we believe that future research could greatly beneﬁt from including moreobjectively measured variables such as company records for measuring
actual working time, turnover, and absenteeism rates; peer ratings, supervisor
ratings, and expert ratings for social functioning, social support, performance,and job characteristics; and medical consumption, and physiological and immunological markers as indicators of health. By using these types of assessments
the previously mentioned problems with self-reports would be avoided.
Another limitation is the homogeneous sample that predominantly consistsof highly educated, experienced, middle-aged, male managers from one particular company. This might have led to a restriction of range and therefore
could have reduced the size of the correlations. For instance, compared toa Dutch representative sample (Schaufeli & Van Dierendonck, 2000), thevariance in all three burnout dimensions is signiﬁcantly lower in the current
sample. Hence, future research should include more heterogeneous samples,
preferably from different companies and consisting of employees holding
various types of jobs. This would also increase the generalisability of the results.
The most important limitation, however, is the cross-sectional nature of
our study that precludes cause–effect relationships being uncovered.
Although regression analysis is often used to examine causal associations,
we merely employ this type of analysis because it is a practically feasible
way to examine associations among our various well-being indicators andother variables, controlling for possible confounders such as age and gender. Thus, our strategy of analysis should not be taken to suggest that we
actually consider the relationships studied here as indicating causal relationships. Yet, for at least two reasons, longitudinal research is particularly
important when it comes to discriminating workaholism, burnout, andwork engagement. First, these three types of well-being might be causally
linked. For instance, as noted before, it has been suggested that workaholism might precede burnout (Maslach, 1986; Porter, 2001). In a similar vein,a qualitative study (Schaufeli et al., 2001) reports that some currently burnedout employees were initially engaged, which agrees with Pines (1993, p. 41),
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who wrote that “… in order to burn out one has to ﬁrst be ‘on ﬁre’”. But
Schaufeli et al. (2001) also observed the reverse process; some employees
who were currently engaged had burned out on their pervious jobs. Thus,
it seems that various types of causal linkages are plausible between the three
types of employee well-being. Clearly, these can only be examined by using
longitudinal research designs. Second, the variables included in the ﬁve setsmight play a different causal role in the case of workaholism, burnout, and work
engagement. For instance, some empirical evidence documents that high job
demands may cause burnout (see Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1988, pp. 82–83,
for an overview), whereas high job demands might be the result of workaholism since workaholics tend to “create” their own demands (Machlowitz,1980). Likewise, it has been argued that poor social functioning outside
work might be the result of burnout—the so-called spillover hypothesis (seeSchaufeli & Enzmann, 1998, p. 88, for an overview)—whereas it was recently
demonstrated that smooth social functioning outside work might foster job
engagement (Montgomery et al., 2003). These examples illustrate that theassociations that were found in the current study can be interpreted in various causal ways, depending on which type of well-being is concerned. Thismeans that it is likely that different underlying psychological mechanisms
operate in producing different types of employee well-being. Future longitudinal research should set out to uncover these mechanisms.

Final Remark
Our study demonstrated that rather than being three of a kind, workaholism,
burnout, and engagement are three different kinds of employee well-being
factors. Therefore, future (longitudinal) research should examine morecomprehensive models of employee well-being that include these concepts
simultaneously. This would increase our understanding beyond traditionalmodels that are restricted to just one type of employee well-being.

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