Held captive in the office: an investigation into long working hours among Korean employees

Although working long hours is a common practice, scholars still know little about what really causes employees to work long hours. Drawing on social information processing and social learning theory, this study examines the role of social contextual antecedents (i.e. supervisor working hours and the perceived overtime climate of one’s workgroup) in influencing employee working hours, after controlling for individual background and job characteristics. Further, we examine whether such relationships are contingent on employees’ individual differences in their identification with leader and a collectivist tendency. A field study of 200 supervisor-subordinate dyads in South Korea revealed a strong positive relationship between the contextual antecedents and employees’ working hours, as well as the moderating effects of the two individual difference variables. Specifically, we found that the relationship between supervisor working hours and employee working hours was more positive for low identifiers than for high identifiers, while the relationship between the perceived overtime climate and employee working hours was more positive for those low in collectivism than for those high in collectivism. Finally, we found that working long hours was associated with lower job satisfaction, higher psychological distress, lower in-role performance, but not with organizational citizenship behavior.