An Introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology

Maria C.W. Peeters, Jan de Jonge, Toon Taris, Maria C.W. Peeters, Jan de Jonge, Toon W. Taris

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118652503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

AN INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY WORK PSYCHOLOGY

"[This book] provides a comprehensive introduction to the field, featuring contributions from around the world. Not only is the book well-written, it is also very readable and entertaining and provides a thorough and scholarly introduction to all aspects of the field. I strongly and unreservedly endorse and recommend it."
— Anthony Harold Winefield, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of South Australia

"Work behaviour is crucial to our health and well-being and to organizational performance. Work also impacts on our behaviour outside work and on family life. With contributions of many of the world's leading experts, this strong editorial team has produced the first standard book on work psychology: the scientific study of work behaviour and its antecedents and consequences. It is a must for anyone seriously interested in work, work behaviour and people at work."
— Michiel Kompier, Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen

An Introduction to Contemporary Work Psychology is the first textbook to provide a comprehensive overview of work psychology. Moving beyond the terrain of introductory industrial/organizational psychology textbooks, this book examines the classic models, current theories and contemporary issues affecting the twenty-first-century worker.

This text covers all aspects of the psychology of working, including topics such as safety at work, working times, work–family interaction, recovery from work, technology, job demands and job resources, working in teams and sickness absence. While many books in the field focus on the adverse effects of work, this one is unique in emphasizing also the positive aspects and outcomes of work, including motivation, performance, creativity and engagement. The book also contains chapters on job-related prevention and intervention strategies with a special focus on positive interventions and proactive techniques, such as job crafting and promoting positive work behaviours.

Edited by respected leaders in the field and with chapters written by a global team of experts, this is the textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on work psychology.

Part F

Outcomes

12

Burnout, Boredom and Engagement in the Workplace

WILMAR B. SCHAUFELI AND MARISA SALANOVA

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Chapter Objectives

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

• define and assess job burnout, boredom at work and work engagement;
• differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of working hard;
• identify the main drivers of engagement as well as the causes of burnout and boredom;
• identify the major consequences of burnout, boredom and engagement;
• understand the psychological mechanisms that are involved in employee affective well-being.

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This chapter is about how employees feel at work. In other words, it is concerned with their psychological well-being, which can be either negative or positive. For instance, employees may feel worn out, cynical or bored, or in contrast, they may feel enthused and full of pep. The way employees feel has not only to do with ‘who they are’ – i.e. their personality – but also with ‘where they are’ – i.e. in their jobs. In essence, employee well-being results from the interaction between person and (work) environment. It depends on the interplay of person-related factors such as temperament and past experiences, and job-related factors such as job characteristics and interpersonal relations at work. More particularly, this chapter focuses on job burnout, boredom at work and work engagement. After a brief historical overview (Section 12.1), these three types of employee well-being are described in greater detail (Section 12.2) and a taxonomy is presented that allows a differentiation with workaholism and job satisfaction (Section 12.3). Next, the antecedents, consequences and correlates of burnout, boredom and engagement are discussed (Section 12.4), as well the role of individual differences (Section 12.5). Finally, psychological explanations for burnout, boredom and work engagement are discussed (Section 12.6), and the chapter closes with some overall conclusions (Section 12.7).

12.1 A Brief History

The practical and scientific interest in employee feelings at work developed relatively recently, although the first accounts date back over a century ago. Historically speaking the interest in employee feelings is intertwined with stress, in this context loosely defined as a physical, mental or emotional response to events or demands that cause bodily or mental tension. Strange as it may seem, both World Wars have contributed much to the interest in employee feelings. During World War I (1914–1918), the British government commissioned the Industrial Fatigue Research Board to come up with solutions to tackle the problem of industrial fatigue in ammunition factories, which caused many injuries and fatal accidents. At about the same time army physicians described ‘shell shock’, an acute stress-reaction that resulted from the extreme demands to which soldiers were exposed in combat situations. During World War II (1940–1945), for the first time quantitative studies of the impact of war on the mental and emotional life of individuals (i.e. soldiers and civilians) were carried out (Stouffer, Suchman, de Vinney, Stra, & Williams, 1949). In the 1940s and 1950s the US Air Force funded a large laboratory research programme about the effects of stress on task performance. This programme was led by Richard Lazarus, who later developed his renowned stress and coping theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the field was dominated by the Institute of Social Research of the University of Michigan, where Kornhauser (1965) carried out a ground-breaking survey on the mental health of automotive workers. In Europe the British Tavistock Institute played a major role with a landmark study in the late 1940s on stress in British coalmines that uncovered the role of social and organizational factors, such as group norms. In the 1970s and 1980s Scandinavian job stress research was highly influential, particularly the work of Karasek and Theorell (1990), who conceived the well-known Demand–Control–Support Model (see Chapter 3).

Initially, no sharp distinction was made between different kinds of mental strain and ill-being, and omnibus measures were used for their assessment. This changed, however, in the late 1970s when job burnout appeared on the scene. This notion entered science through the backdoor, so to speak. ‘Burnout’ is a metaphor that was used by professionals, particularly those working in the human services such as health care, social work, psychotherapy and law enforcement, to describe a state of mental exhaustion. It has been argued that the emergence of burnout is rooted in the social and cultural changes that have taken place since the 1960s, such as the growth and bureaucratization of welfare institutions and the weakening of professional authority, both of which put considerable strain on human services professionals (Schaufeli, Leiter, & Maslach, 2009). In fact, the history of burnout developed along two lines: a practical, interventionist tradition that focused on the assessment, prevention and treatment of burnout, and an academic research tradition that focused on identifying its causes and consequences, and uncovering its psychological underpinnings. Quite remarkably, both traditions developed relatively independently and only occasional overlap, for instance in case of the practical use of validated burnout measures and the scientific evaluation of interventions to prevent or to combat burnout. Meanwhile, ‘burnout business’ is booming and over 6, 600 scientific articles have been published on the subject.

Although boredom at work was recognized as a topic worthy of scientific inquiry by the pioneer of applied psychology Hugo Münsterberg back in 1913, it is still investigated only occasionally. Traditionally boredom, which is conceived as a state of low arousal and dissatisfaction due to an unchallenging work situation, is investigated in relation to monotonous and repetitive work, for instance at assembly lines. The first empirical studies on boredom were carried out before and during World War II using a human factors perspective and focused on task performance in a laboratory setting. Boredom in organizations was not studied until the 1960s and 1970s, and currently fewer than 400 scientific studies have appeared.

Since the turn of the century, work engagement has emerged as the opposite of burnout, namely a state of mental energy. Like burnout, the notion of engagement was first used in practice in business settings by human resources-professionals and consultants because an organization’s mental capital, that is, the cognitive and emotional fortitude and strength of its employees, is nowadays of increasing economic significance. For modern organizations, employees’ mental fitness rather than their mere physical fitness provides a decisive competitive advantage. From a scientific point of view, the emergence of work engagement has been fostered by the rise of positive psychology, which studies human strength and optimal functioning, since the turn of the century. From 2000 till 2012 over 1,100 scientific publications were published on work or employee engagement (these terms are used interchangeably).

12.2 Defining and Assessing Burnout, Boredom and Engagement

In this section we will describe how the three different indicators of psychological well-being are generally defined and assessed.

Burnout

As mentioned earlier, burnout is a metaphor that is commonly used to describe a state or process of mental exhaustion, similar to the smothering of a fire or the extinguishing of a candle. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘to burn out’ as ‘to fail, wear out, or become exhausted by making excessive demands on energy, strength, or resources’.

Although various definitions of burnout exist, the most often cited academic definition comes from Maslach, Jackson and Leiter (1986, p. 1): ‘Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who do “people work” of some kind.’ So burnout consists of three dimensions in this definition. Emotional exhaustion refers to the depletion or draining of emotional resources caused by interpersonal demands. Depersonalization points to the development of negative, callous and cynical attitudes towards the recipients of one’s services. The term ‘depersonalization’ may cause some confusion since it is used in a completely different sense in psychiatry, namely to denote a person’s extreme alienation from self and the world. However, in Maslach and Jackson’s definition, depersonalization refers to an impersonal and dehumanized perception of recipients, rather than to an impersonal view of self. Finally, lack of personal accomplishment is the tendency to evaluate one’s work with recipients negatively. Burned-out professionals believe that their objectives are not achieved, which is accompanied by feelings of insufficiency and poor professional self-esteem. For a description of burnout see the story of Peter – a burned-out teacher (Work Psychology in Action box).

Initially, Maslach and Jackson claimed that burnout exclusively occurs among professionals who deal with recipients (e.g. students, pupils, clients, patients or delinquents) face-to-face. Hence, in their view burnout is restricted to the helping professions, at least initially. But in the 1990s the concept of burnout was broadened and defined as a crisis in one’s relationship with work in general and not necessarily as a crisis in one’s relationship with people at work (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). From that time onwards burnout was also investigated outside the human services. For that purpose, the three original burnout dimensions were redefined: exhaustion refers to fatigue irrespective of its cause, cynicism reflects an indifferent or distant attitude towards work instead of other people and lack of professional efficacy encompasses both social and non-social aspects of occupational accomplishment. In other words, burnout is a multidimensional construct that includes a stress reaction (exhaustion or fatigue), a mental distancing response (depersonalization or cynicism) and a negative belief (lack of accomplishment or efficacy).

Psychologically speaking these three components are related (see also Section 12.6). Exhaustion results from exposure to chronic stressors at work (e.g. work overload, emotional demands, interpersonal conflicts). In an attempt to prevent further energy depletion, employees distance themselves mentally from their work by developing depersonalizing or cynical attitudes. In doing so, their work performance is likely to dimi...