Engaged Workers or Workaholics: The Relationships between Time Perspective and Workaholism/Work Engagement in Japanese Workers

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of Time perspective characteristics on workaholism and work engagement in Japanese workers. For defining workaholism and work engagement, we considered the definition provided by Schaufeli, et al. (2009). The respondents were 155 Japanese employees which 75 were male, 75 were female and 5 did not respond to demographic information questions. To investigate the effect of the Time perspective, we categorized the collected data of Japanese workers on all five dimensions of this variable into three profiles through cluster analysis. According to the recommendation of Zimbardo & Boyd (2008), we named these time perspective clusters as Negative, Future, and Balanced. Following that, we tested the difference of each cluster in workaholism and work engagement with the one-way ANOVA test. The result indicated that working compulsively is significantly higher in the Negative cluster, but there was no significant difference in the three clusters regarding working excessively. Besides, work engagement was significantly higher in the balanced Cluster.