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Job Burnout

Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter (2001) describe job burnout as a psychological syndrome that occurs in response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. It has three key dimensions.

Overwhelming exhaustion, which represents the basic individual stress dimension and includes feelings of being overextended and depleted of one's emotional and physical resources.
Feelings of cynicism, depersonalisation and detachment from the job, which represents the interpersonal, contextual dimension, and includes a negative, callous or excessively detached response to various aspects of the job.
A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment, which refers to the self-evaluation dimension, and includes reduced feelings of efficacy and accomplishment, feelings of incompetence, a lack of achievement and a lack of productivity.

Burnout research had its roots in caregiving and service occupations where aid and service to people in need is given and where emotional and interpersonal stressors are evident. Early interviews with human-service workers identified that coping strategies had important implications for people's professional identity and job behaviour. Importantly, burnout was seen not so much as an individual stress response but in terms of the person's transactions in the workplace, with attention to emotions and the motives and values underlying the person's work (p. 400). The rewards and costs of relationships are important.

The concept of burnout received increasing research attention, and was extended from human services to education and other occupations (such as clerical, military and managers), maintaining a focus on the transaction between the person and the organisational environment.

Burnout is associated with negative effects on job performance (absenteeism, intention to leave, turnover, lower productivity, lower effectiveness, reduced job satisfaction and reduced commitment) and stress-related physical illnesses (p. 406). The authors write that the relationship between burnout and mental health appears to be complex, with the common assumption being that burnout precipitates anxiety, depression, lowered self-esteem and so on. However, an alternative argument is that people who are already mentally healthy are more able to cope with chronic stressors and are therefore less likely to experience burnout.

Job characteristics that contribute to burnout include workload, time pressure, role conflict, role ambiguity, an absence of resources (especially social support from supervisors and co-workers), and a lack of information, control and autonomy.

Maslach, Schaufeli and Leiter (2001) compared the prevalence of burnout for five different occupational sectors in the United States and Holland, and found that teaching was characterised by the highest level of exhaustion, with teachers' cynicism and lack of efficacy being close to population averages.

Research by Dorman (2003) with teachers in Queensland found that role overload was a strong predictor of work pressure, which in turn predicted emotional exhaustion. Work pressure, classroom environment and self-esteem accounted for 69% of the variance in teachers' emotional exhaustion, and over 46% of the variance in depersonalisation was attributable to school environment, classroom environment, emotional exhaustion and self-esteem.

Individual characteristics appear to contribute to burnout, although not to the same degree as situational factors. Individual factors include age, with the level of burnout being higher among younger employees. However, such interpretations must be taken with caution, as people who burn out early and remove themselves from the profession are no longer part of the sample during later years. Small effects have been found for sex (males - more prone to cynicism), marital status (singles - more prone to burnout), and education (higher education equals higher burnout). However, all of these variables are confounded with other variables, such that definitive statements should not be made.

Personality characteristics are another area for investigation, including low hardiness (involvement in daily activities, sense of control, openness to change), external locus of control (attributing events and achievements to other people or to chance), passive, defensive coping styles, low self-esteem, neuroticism (anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, vulnerability), type A behaviour (competition, time-pressure, hostility and excessive need for control) and 'feeling types' rather than 'thinking types'.

Research by Maslach and Leiter (1997, cited in Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001, p. 413) seeks to integrate the personal and situational dimensions of burnout, in particular the degree of 'fit' between the person and six domains of the job environment. The enduring relationship, or psychological contract, that people have with their job is an important aspect of this research, such as when critical issues are left unresolved, or when the working relationship changes to something that the worker finds unacceptable.

The six areas of working life that encompass the central relationships with potential burnout are:

workload - excessive overload, wrong kind of work, emotional inconsistency
control - insufficient control over resources, lack of authority, overwhelming responsibility exceeding authority
reward - insufficient financial reward, lack of social recognition, lack of intrinsic reward (such as pride)
community - loss of positive connection with others in the workplace (shared praise, comfort, happiness, humour, values), workplace conflict
fairness - perceived unfairness (such as pay, cheating, promotions), lack of mutual respect
values - ethics, career aspirations, mission statements and practices.

The authors state that the issue of burnout has prompted many interventions, but relatively little research on effectiveness. In particular, they point to a paradox: that interventions tend to focus on the individual (removal, behaviour change, coping skills, relaxation), whereas the research has found that situational factors play a bigger role (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001, p. 418).

Future directions include conceptualising job engagement as the positive foil to burnout, and managing organisational change through the positive development of energy, vigour, involvement, absorption and effectiveness (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001, p. 420).

A wealth of information about staff burnout can be found at: Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA. (2004). An introductory packet on understanding and minimizing staff burnout. Los Angeles, CA: Author. http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu

Related articles can be found at:
Attributing the Cause of Events
Beliefs About Success and Failure

References
Dorman, J. (2003). 'Testing a model for teacher burnout.' Australian Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology, 3, 35-47. http://www.newcastle.edu.au/Resources/Research%20Centres/SORTI/Journals/AJEDP/Vol%203/v3-dorman.pdf

Maslach, C., Schaufeli, W. B., & Leiter, M. P. (2001). 'Job burnout.' Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 397-422.