Workaholism, in recent years, has become a regular behaviour pattern among professionals. While self-negligence is assumed as a hallmark of workaholism, empirical data in this case stands to be both narrow and paradoxical. Modern developments like high-speed data connections add more to this belief, as this makes it possible for employees who would like to work at any place and at any given point of time to work. Workaholism is found to affect several important domains of life. With regards to work domain, workaholics commonly seem to have poor associations with their peer/colleagues, most likely on the grounds that they often feel the need to control them and experience issues with delegating work. Given that the amount of time they invested in their work leaves little energy for them for other activities, also the social life outside work gets hampered. This chapter explores the relationship between workaholism, perceived work-related stress, different job conditions, and intensifying anxiety among IT professionals in Delhi/NCR.
TopIntroduction
With the fast leap of technology innovation and competitiveness, the leisure and comfort among today’s employees have also improved. A new 24/7 economy has freed the old work environment paradigm, as never before. As an aftermath, an interminable transformation in working pattern is evidently noticeable. With globalization and the pace of technology change in society, the modern economy organizations have become indeed exceptionally demanding. This also has augmented the need for growth, followed with frequent breakdowns among working employees.
Number of studies (Estes & Wang, 2008; Hooks & Hicks, 2002) have shown that working conditions have changed expeditiously. Ambiguity of clear role expectations at work is high and the balance between work and personal being has become vaguer (Srikanth & Jomon, 2013). Stress rates at work have upsurge in the past decade resulting in psychiatric health problems and turning down of work productivity. It is also evident from numerous reports that a high level of perceived stress at work is related to low level of satisfaction with job and poor mental condition (Dhabhar, et al., 2010). Several researches have also reported significant associations between occupational stress, anger, work-family conflict and psychological and physical health. Henceforth, a great deal of attention is being given to the issues of work-related stress and health (Schaufeli, et al., 2008) which is often discussed in daily conversations.
Stress
Stress, over the years, has been defined in diverse ways. Formerly, it was regarded as some kind of pressure from the environment which later on turned into strain within the individual (Shimazu&Schaufeli, 2007). An extreme mode of stress can hinder productivity and impact one’s physical and mental health. It can also threaten the individuals as well as organisations from attainment of goals. Mohanty & Jena (2016) has found in their investigation that job turn out to be less fulfilling under extreme stress and that their expected inherent and outward needs are not satisfied. Tomar (2017) found that IT professionals have long work hours with various time zones, add up to cooperation, undertaking to be finished on due date with flawlessness as per customer needs, which requires relational, specialized, and authoritative. These attributes prompt word related stress and work exhaustion.