Sustainable Working and Academia: A Transdisciplinary Model of Workaholism within Higher Education

In the literature, academia is often referred to as a high-demand job regardless of location, with increasing demands often associated with neoliberal policies commencing at the start of the twenty-first century. Simultaneously, academia is an essential job for economic development in that it builds a knowledge base within societies that impacts the employability of the workforce in addition to research revelations. Yet overworking, especially workaholism, is problematic in jobs such as academia given the open-ended nature of the work and a high demand environment. This article examines workaholism in academia through the lenses of institutional, self-determination, conservation of resources, and job-demands resources (JD-R) theory. In doing so, it presents three propositions explaining workaholism in academia related to micro, meso, and macro factors.