Examining the work-family experience of workaholic women

Abstract

This chapter explores the unique experiences of workaholic women, with an emphasis on how this extreme devotion to work can lead to high levels of work-family conflict. The chapter proposes that these negative effects are particularly keen for workaholic women, compared to their male counterparts. It begins with a brief description of work aholism, followed by a summary of the unique struggles of a workaholic woman, who struggles to reconcile societal expectations that she should be intensively committed to her family (schema of family devotion) with her inner drive to be heavily involved in work (workaholic tendencies). In addition to her internal struggles, the workaholic woman is likely to be chastised by family, friends, and others to the extent she is heavily involved with work at the expense of her family. Finally, the chapter briefly summarizes the results of an empirical study involving 215 working women, which examined how discrete emotions provide one mechanism through which a woman’s workaholic behavior can spill over and negatively affect functioning in another domain (i.e., work-to-family and family-to-work conflict). One of the more surprising and intriguing results of this study was that for these women, workaholism was positively related to anger at home, which in turn was related to greater family-to-work conflict. Implications of this study are discussed and integrated into the main ideas presented in the chapter. The chapter concludes with a summary of the main points and a proposed agenda for future research.