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)