Years have passed since I started my academic career, and I have come to realise that, in academia, excellence appears to come with a price tag. Stress and pressure have become commonplace for academics, often normalising certain behaviours such as workaholism. This essay explores how workaholism have become a common practice in these working environments.
It was late, the library lights were blinking out. One more email, one more figure, one more line to rewrite. “Just stop for a minute and… smile.”; sometimes that’s the hardest part! What begins as genuine enthusiasm can quietly morph into an asymmetrical relationship with work, a constant desire to “do a little more” that doesn’t subside with the rest. In academic life, that itch can look like excellence. But it can also be a symptom of workaholism: working excessively because we feel internally compelled, even when sleep, health, or relationships call for a pause.
This pattern not only comes at a private cost, but also permeates into our labs, offices, classrooms, and homes. “Why is everybody so serious?”… Here I will address four aspects that help to outline the terrain for workalcoholism: the leader’s ripple effect, compulsive effort vs. healthy engagement, the time evolution of workaholism, and universities as fertile ground for work excess.
When a leader pulls the whole team: the leader’s ripple effect
Look upward in the org chart. A recent study found that leader workaholism isn’t confined to one person’s calendar: it also increases subordinates’ psychological distress (Dong and Li, 2024). It’s not only that “the boss works a lot”; it’s the transmission of expectations and signals of constant availability, after long hours meetings, instant replies as the norm, re-work driven by perfectionism. The pressure becomes atmospheric, and people slip into hyper-vigilance. “Everybody look to their left… everybody look to their right, can you feel that?”, Teams can!
Minimizing the damage originated from this type of behavior requires clear processes and respectful day-to-day treatment, where procedural and interpersonal justice become key components of the team organization (Dong and Li, 2024). The edge of a workaholic leader dulls when people understand how decisions are made, they can express concerns without retaliation, and receive feedback with dignity. It’s not magic, but it is a lever: even if personalities don’t change overnight, it’s important to strengthen processes and norms of interaction to ultimately protect mental health. “It’s not about the money, money, money…” , because in Academia you don’t (usually) make money, but you build reputation; and in that process, it’s about fairness in how we move, decide, and treat one another.
Compulsive effort vs. healthy engagement
Now, I’d like to separate two often confusing ideas: workaholism and work engagement. Both can involve long hours, but they are driven by different motors. In workaholism, the motor is compulsion, rumination, guilt for not working, difficulty of detaching. In engagement, the motor is vigor, energy, meaning, enjoyable absorption. In a study of 776 Japanese employees, high workaholism correlated with more distress, more somatic complaints, and lower satisfaction, while high engagement correlated with the opposite pattern (Shimazu et al., 2009). “When the sale comes first and the truth comes second”, we can misread sheer volume as virtue.
This distinction is crucial in Academia, where passion is our entry point and metrics love visibility. If institutional recognition rewards only long hours and large volumes of emails and outputs, we risk confusing devotion with addiction. Building resources that feed engagement (autonomy, support, useful feedback, purpose) doesn’t push people toward compulsion; it sustains creativity and performance without burning them out (Shimazu et al., 2009). “We just wanna make the world dance, forget about the price tag”. Let’s value the quality of energy, not only the quantity of hours.
How workaholism changes over time
A recent study followed professionals for a year and found that workaholism increases hours worked, role overload, and the likelihood of depression as months go by (Afota M-C et al., 2025). This isn’t a short sprint before a deadline; it’s a slope that grows slippery. Short-term output can take a toll on health. “Am I the only one gettin’… tired?” Probably not.
In contrast, work engagement is linked to less depression and less emotional exhaustion over time (Afota M-C et al., 2025). The takeaway of this section is therefore intuitive and powerful. Not all “intense investment” is equal. Intense investment fuelled by meaning is sustainable; intense investment fuelled by guilt or fear erodes engagement. For teams and leaders, that means designing rhythms and expectations that prioritizes well-being, not physiological and emotional debt. “Can we all slow down and enjoy right now, guarantee we’ll be feelin’ all right.”
The University: a fertile ground for excess
Back to home turf: University. Using data from thousands in Norwegian universities, researchers found that academic staff report more workaholism and more work–family conflict than technical/administrative colleagues (Torp et al., 2018). The standout driver is role overload: publish, teach, supervise, manage projects, win funding, disseminate… all at once, tracked by metrics that rarely sleep. In this broth, workaholism functions as a bridge: it links high demands to friction at home (Torp et al., 2018). “Money can’t buy us happiness,” but incentives and prestige can quietly buy our evenings, weekends, and presence.
Figure 2. Tense environment that is normalized in Academic. Working until late. Image generated using VEED IA.
As workaholism has become an institutional issue, “setting boundaries” has become a matter of more than just individual willpower. In this context, if incentives reward output volumes and constant availability, culture will increasingly normalize excess. Changing the situation requires three harmonized layers: structural (realistic allocation and prioritization), cultural (de-normalize 24/7 presence), and personal (recovery practices, visible limits, honest team conversations). Without touching all three, the system nudges people toward compulsion even if no one says it out loud (Torp et al., 2018). “So, bring back the beat and everybody sing…”, but let’s set a tempo humans can keep.
Final reflections: price tag!
Put the four pieces together and the picture sharpens: workaholism isn’t a hidden badge of honour; it’s a systemic risk that spills onto teams and families (Dong and Li, 2024). It’s not the same as engagement and doesn’t guarantee superior results; sustained over time, it erodes health and creativity (Shimazu et al., 2009; Afota M-C et al., 2025; Torp et al., 2018). Academia, with its multi-front demands and tireless metrics, offers a climate where this can flourish without anyone planning it. “You can’t put a price on the life, we do this for the love so we fight and sacrifice every night…” Let’s align our practices with those lyrics.
The alternative isn’t a praise for “less work,” but choosing to work better instead: build justice into processes and daily interactions, feed engagement with real resources, reset expectations to human rhythms, and recognize that rest isn’t an absence of merit and productivity but the precondition for clear thinking, creative science, and generous teaching (Dong and Li, 2024; Shimazu et al., 2009; Frontiers in Psychology, 2025; Torp et al., 2018). “It’s not about the money, money, money… we just wanna make the world dance, forget about the price tag.”
References
Afota, M.-C., Robert, V., & Vandenberghe, C. (2025). Workaholism, work engagement, and affective commitment: Relationships to self-concept levels and work outcomes. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1434482.
Li, X., Wu, C.-H., & Zhang, Y. (2024). Leader workaholism and subordinates’ psychological distress: The moderating role of justice climate. Acta Psychologica, 241, 104157.
Shimazu, A., Schaufeli, W. B., & Taris, T. W. (2009). Is workaholism good or bad for employee well-being? The distinctiveness of workaholism and work engagement among Japanese employees. Industrial Health, 47(5), 495–502.
Torp, S., Lysfjord, L., & Midje, H. H. (2018). Workaholism and work–family conflict among university academics. Higher Education, 76(6), 1071–1090.
