In 2021 four researchers from Ohio State, Rutgers and Harvard published studies on people who agree with statements like “Time spent on leisure activities is often wasted time.” Such people enjoyed leisure less. They also reported lower happiness and more depression, anxiety and stress.
Their advice was practical. “If leisure can be framed as having some kind of productive goal, that helps people who think leisure is wasteful,” said Rebecca Reczek of Ohio State.
The word workaholic is usually credited to Wayne Oates, an American professor of the psychology of religion and pastoral care. He used it in a 1968 article, “On Being a ‘Workaholic’,” and in his book Confessions of a Workaholic, copyright 1970.
The word is older. In 1947 the Toronto Daily Star joked about a group called Workaholics Synonymous. The Thomasville Times-Enterprise used workaholic in 1962. In 1983 a corporate financial planner and a schoolteacher in New York formed Workaholics Anonymous, a twelve-step fellowship.
In 2017 three marketing scholars, Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia and Anat Keinan, published a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. Its title is “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol.” They argued that in North America “a busy and overworked lifestyle, rather than a leisurely lifestyle, has become an aspirational status symbol.”
Keinan explained: “the new conspicuous consumption is about saying, I am the scarce resource, and therefore I am valuable.”
The phrase conspicuous consumption comes from Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). For Veblen, leisure was the mark of status.
A German driver who loses the license for driving with 1.6 per mille of alcohol or more cannot simply apply again after the ban. The Driving License Regulation requires a medizinisch-psychologische Untersuchung, a medical and psychological examination. Germans call it the MPU, or the Idiotentest, the idiot test. It includes a medical check, reaction tests and an interview with a psychologist. According to the legal publisher Haufe, the psychologist expects konkrete Anhaltspunkte für eine daraus resultierende Verhaltensänderung, concrete signs of a change in behavior. In March 2021 the Federal Administrative Court ruled that the authority may order the test even below 1.6 per mille. This applies when there are signs of an unusually high tolerance for alcohol, such as driving with 1.1 per mille or more without visible impairment.
In 1992 the psychologists Henry Cloud and John Townsend published Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life. The publisher calls it a plan “for setting healthy boundaries with family, friends, and co-workers.” Wikipedia puts its sales at two million copies.
In 2021 the therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab published Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a New York Times bestseller. Its description says, “Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them in order to achieve work/life balance.”
In December 2013 the news agency dpa reported on company rules against e-mail after work. The strict rule at Volkswagen applied only to employees under the collective agreement, not to managers. Siemens had no special rule and left the decision to employees. The work psychologist Tim Hagemann said that the higher one rises in the hierarchy, the more one has to get used to e-mail after the end of the working day.
In these examples, the protection of free time was weakest at the top.
The Mannheim work psychologist Sabine Sonnentag studies how people recover from work. Research links Abschalten, switching off mentally after work, with less tiredness the next morning. In 2019 Sonnentag and colleagues published a study of 151 employees in the Journal of Management. It found that people also need to reconnect mentally with their work at the start of the day. This tuning in, Einstimmen, goes together with activating work-related goals.
GLOBE is a large international study of culture and leadership. Two psychologists at German universities, Felix Brodbeck and Michael Frese, analyzed its data for Germany. With Mansour Javidan, they published a paper in 2002 titled Leadership made in Germany: Low on compassion, high on performance.
In 2004, Brodbeck described German leaders as oriented to the task, jedoch partizipativ um die besten Lösungen ringend, but struggling for the best solutions in a participative way. Their cooperation rests on die institutionell verankerte Partizipation auf Augenhöhe, participation at eye level that is anchored in institutions. In the GLOBE data, German managers express very high expectations that leaders be participative.
Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. This is the guiding principle of Gestalt psychology. Its more precise form is Das Ganze ist etwas anderes als die Summe seiner Teile, the whole is something other than the sum of its parts.
Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler worked together on the theory from 1910, first in Frankfurt and later in Berlin.
The sentence is often credited to Aristotle. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote that the whole is something besides the parts.
The German psychologist Sylvia Schroll-Machl describes Sachorientierung, orientation toward the matter, as a German cultural standard. In 2004, in a box headed Wir Deutschen, we Germans, she wrote: Die Sache ist uns wichtiger als die Person. The matter is more important to us than the person. Wir können durchaus mit jemandem auf sachlicher Ebene zusammenarbeiten, obwohl wir uns persönlich nicht besonders mögen. We can certainly work with someone on a factual level, even though we do not particularly like each other personally. In the same series she warns that thinking this alone is enough for working together is der häufigste deutsche Irrtum, the most common German mistake.