Emily Kleszewski

Workaholism, defined as working excessively and compulsively, poses significant risks to employees’ well-being and health (Clark et al., 2016; Taris & de Jonge, 2024). Research is increasingly shifting from a stable outcome-focused perspective to examining antecedents and short-term fluctuations in workaholism symptoms (Menghini & Spagnoli, 2024), which helps explain how workaholic behaviors emerge over time. While personality traits and job demands have been studied as antecedents, social influences remain underexplored. Sociocultural experiences and the organizational environment can foster workaholism (Ng et al., 2007; Keller et al., 2016), and employees’ perceptions of coworkers as workaholic may play a critical role (Atrozsko et al., 2025). Workaholic employees may also provide less social support, prioritizing their own tasks over others’ needs (Zeijen et al., 2024). However, as the time frame in which the phenomenon of workaholism contagion may occur and its social costs for coworkers remain unclear, we employed a dyadic study design to address these questions. Guided by social information processing theory (Salancik & Pfeffer, 1978) and the compensatory control model (Hockey, 1997), we examined how employees’ workaholism symptoms influence their coworkers’ symptoms and exhaustion via reduced social support. We conducted a weekly diary study over five weeks with 70 coworker dyads, yielding 267 weekly observations. Multilevel analyses in Mplus indicate that employees’ weekly workaholism was positively related to their own exhaustion and suggest contagion effects at the dyadic and weekly level, although contagion effects at the weekly level appear contingent on coworker contact. By focusing on interpersonal dynamics, this study provides initial evidence for its potential social costs and that workaholism symptoms appear to unfold over relatively short time frames. We hope that the insights from our study encourage future research to adopt team-based approaches to study the emergence of workaholism and inform organizational strategies for its prevention.