Fear of Work

William Upson's definition puts both readings together: the art of laziness, and a morbid fear or hatred of work. One phrase treats the behaviour as a choice being made skilfully and the other treats it as a condition. A term carrying both at once has never settled what it is describing.

It was mentioned by a hospital in New Jersey in the 1860s, which makes it older than most of the vocabulary in this catalogue.

What it covers

The definition is broad: an extreme and disabling fear associated with work, manual or otherwise, a fear of finding or of losing employment, or a fear of specific tasks in the workplace.

The features are described as often consistent with social phobia or performance anxiety rather than with a fear of labour. The list is specific:

• fear of failing at assigned tasks
• public speaking at work, and performance anxiety
• fear of socialising with colleagues
• fear of emotional, psychological or physical injury at work

Almost every item there concerns other people rather than the work itself, which is the strongest argument in the material that ergophobia is a setting rather than an object.

What the manual does with it

Ergophobia is not specifically defined in DSM-5, and its criteria can be accounted for under other specific phobia, 300.29, F40.298.

The nearer neighbours are named. Generalised anxiety disorder produces uncontrollably elevated anxiety over varying issues, and adults with it can feel stressed by everyday work tasks, evaluations and presentations. Social anxiety disorder is easily exacerbated by presentations and workplace interaction. Other specified anxiety disorder causes distress and significant anxiety without fully meeting the criteria for an anxiety disorder, and greatly influences occupational performance.

Three conditions that all produce difficulty at work, and a term that names the difficulty rather than the condition.

How burnout is measured

Ergophobia is considered by some a corollary of occupational burnout, thought to result from long-term unresolvable job stress. Nobody used burnout regularly until the 1970s, and in the United States. Freudenberger applied it to a specific thing: being worn out in body and feeling, with the sourness that comes with it, produced by working intensely with other people.

Burnout appears to be more common in health care and mental health care, social welfare work, law, and business organisations.

There is no formal diagnostic procedure for either ergophobia or burnout, and the Maslach Burnout Inventory is used together with the Areas of Worklife Survey to assess levels. Those measure emotional burnout, depersonalisation and personal achievement, and suit individual or group assessment.

A study of teacher burnout found that those experiencing ergophobia performed significantly worse on a physical health index than their colleagues, which is the one hard outcome measure in the entry.

What the workplace contributes

Two observations locate part of the problem outside the person.

The number of cases increases with the number of people working in an environment that produces it, regardless of any change in the reported rate. And performance appraisal systems, now popular for enhancing commitment and productivity, can exacerbate emotional exhaustion and subsequently produce burnout.

The material also notes that the shift to a service-based economy has significantly altered the employer and employee relationship, which is the context those appraisal systems arrived in.

Why overdiagnosis is a risk

The source raises a caution about its own subject that few articles do. The proliferation of mental health awareness in popular Western culture may lead to misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis, and because fear of work is such a general catchall, many people may believe they have ergophobia when they are dealing with occupational stress or with generalised anxiety disorder or social anxiety disorder.

That is the honest position on a term of this shape, and it sits awkwardly beside the first sentence of this entry. A concept dismissed as laziness in the past and warned about as overdiagnosis now has been wrong in both directions.

The 2008 printed encyclopedia is more useful than either, defining fear of work as related to social anxieties, perfectionism and fear of failure, as well as anxiety over exertion and effort.