About every tenth employee in Germany shows a workaholic behavior at work. Managers in particular suffered above average from symptoms of workaholism, said the union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation in Düsseldorf on Wednesday. According to a study, people affected by addictive work not only work very long, fast and in parallel on different tasks, they can only take time off with a bad conscience.

For the study sponsored by the Böckler Foundation, employees of the Federal Institute for Vocational Training (BIBB) and the Technical University of Braunschweig evaluated the representative data of 8,000 employees. The data comes from the years 2017 and 2018 – i.e. from the time before Corona. According to the study, 9.8 percent of the workers surveyed worked addictively. Another 33 percent worked excessively – but not compulsively. On the other hand, 54.9 percent of those in employment went about their jobs “calmly”.

Addictive work is therefore not a marginal phenomenon that only affects a small group of managers. In fact, excessive and compulsive work is widespread in all groups of workers, it said. Nevertheless, there is “a statistically highly significant connection” between addictive work and managerial responsibility. Executives are 12.4 percent workaholic, other workers only 8.7 percent. “Among executives, addictive work is also more pronounced the higher the management level is,” the study authors explained.