Adicción al trabajo: Características, detección y prevención desde una perspectiva integral

Abstract

Introduction The work gives the person a sense of identity, affects its self-esteem and gives legitimacy to the family and society. However, there is a fraction of workers who carry it out in a very intense and compulsive way, which has negative implications. This sets a condition known as work addiction.Objective To describe the characteristics of workaholism and factors that predispose to it, as well as preventive actions to avoid workaholism at organizational and individual level. Methods: Literature review and critical and reflexive reading. workaholism within the following database: Medline, Cuiden, Cochrane, Pubmed and Google Scholar using as keywords: nursing, workaholism and clinical symptomatology during 2013. Results: The appearance of physical symptoms are usually indicators for detecting workaholism, however, these physical symptoms alone do not allow to point out a possible addiction, being also necessary to evaluate psychological and social aspects. Conclusions: It is difficult to differentiate between hard work and workaholism for four main reasons: 1) the rejection of the problem by the person affected 2) hardworking people are praised in society, excessive devotion is regarded as a quality 3) the lack of information to the population for awareness raising of work addiction as a disease, 4) non-existence of workaholism within the criteria of diagnostic manuals (ICD-10). © Servicio de Publicaciones - Universidad de Murcia.