Perceived Coworkers' Work Addiction: Scale Development and Validation

This is part of the global project on work addiction, which was financed by the National Science Centre, Poland, under grant no. 2020/39/D/HS6/00198 (“The role of macro-, meso-, and micro-level factors in work addiction and related health problems”). The project is led by the consortium of the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland (Prof. Edyta Charzyńska) and the University of Gdańsk, Poland (Prof. Paweł A. Atroszko). 

The dataset “Data” (available in CSV UTF-8 and XLSX formats) contains data collected online from 33,222 employees from six continents and 85 cultures. The data were used to develop a valid, reliable, short, and cross-culturally invariant tool for assessing the perceived supervisors' work addiction and the perceived colleagues' work addiction—the Perceived Coworkers' Work Addiction Scale (PCWAS). Data were collected online between autumn 2022 and winter 2023.

Statistical analyses included: confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to establish the structure of the PCWAS, multi-group CFA (MGCFA) and the alignment method to examine measurement invariance of the PCWAS across cultures; MGCFA to assess measurement invariance of the PCWAS between genders and between managerial positions; comparison of latent means; and structural equation models to examine the associations between perceived supervisor's work addiction and perceived colleagues' work addiction with one's own work addiction, job stress, and job satisfaction. Additionally, descriptive statistics, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and correlations with criterion variables (one's own work addiction, job stress, and job satisfaction) were calculated. Analyses were conducted using MPlus version 8.0 (Muthén & Muthén, 2017).

The results indicate that the PCWAS is a valid and reliable short screening scale for assessing perceived supervisor's and colleagues' work addiction. It can be used globally in clinical and organizational settings, providing comparable and generalizable results.

Full List of Funding Sources (Including Those Related to Data Collection in Specific Cultures):

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland [grant number 2020/39/D/HS6/00198].

Data collection in Armenia was supported by the Science Committee of the Republic of Armenia in the frames of the research project 25RG-5A025.

Data collection in the Czech Republic was supported by financing from NPO “Systemic Risk Institute” no. LX22NPO5101, funded by European Union - Next Generation EU (Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, NPO: EXCELES).

Data collection in Hungary was supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development, and Innovation Office (Grant number: FK134807) and the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences granted to Bernadette Kun.

Acknowledgments: The authors are deeply grateful to the members of the team involved in the Global Research on Work Addiction for their contributions to data collection and their overall involvement in the project. A list of international collaborators and their bios is available on the project’s website: https://workaddiction.org/team.

Files Attached: (i) Dataset; (ii) Codebook; (iii) MPlus script for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), (iv) MPlus script for multi-group CFA (MGCFA), (v) MPlus script for alignment method, (vi) MPlus script for structural equation modeling (SEM); and (vii) README file.