Burnout at Work

A psychological perspective

Michael P. Leiter, Arnold B. Bakker, Christina Maslach, Michael P Leiter, Arnold B Bakker, Christina Maslach

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317909798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The psychological concept of burnout refers to long-term exhaustion from, and diminished interest in, the work we do. It's a phenomenon that most of us have some understanding of, even if we haven't always been affected directly. Many people start their working lives full of energy and enthusiasm, but far fewer are able to maintain that level of engagement.

Burnout at Work: A Psychological Perspective provides a comprehensive overview of how the concept of burnout has been conceived over recent decades, as well as discussing the challenges and possible interventions that can help confront this pervasive issue. Including contributions from the most eminent researchers in this field, the book examines a range of topics including:

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• The links between burnout and health

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• How our individual relationships at work can affect levels of burnout

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• The role of leadership in mediating or causing burnout

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• The strategies that individuals can pursue to avoid burnout, as well as wider interventions.

The book will be required reading for anyone studying organizational or occupational psychology, and will also interest students of business and management, and health psychology.

1
The contemporary context of job burnout

Michael P. Leiter, Arnold B. Bakker, and Christina Maslach

The contemporary context of job burnout

Job burnout was first identified in the 1970s as a career crisis of professionals working with people in some capacity. Subsequent research has established that burnout was neither a passing phase of baby boomers’ entry into the workforce nor a minor problem easily resolved. Instead, burnout has persisted.

Burnout as a human challenge

Despite a considerable body of knowledge about the nature of job burnout, its causes, and its consequences, burnout continues as a major career crisis in the twenty-first century. The persistence of burnout over time and its prevalence around the world support the idea that burnout reflects a fundamental challenge of working life (Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli et al., 2008). People do not simply shrug off frustrations at work, but react in ways that are reflected in their energy (exhaustion), involvement (cynicism), and efficacy. That quality of people was not specific to late twentieth-century America, but was a pervasive, widespread phenomenon.

Complementing this enduring quality of people were enduring qualities in the nature of workplaces. In 2013, many people work in situations that are conducive to burnout. Some struggle to address intense demands with inadequate resources. Some feel alienated from their employers’ espousal of lofty values for which their employers evidence no meaningful commitment. Some do tedious, joyless, meaningless work for meagre pay. These and other changes in the nature of work have implications for employees’ vulnerability to burnout (Ten Brummelhuis et al., 2012).

The social and economic context of work

The information/service economy that dominates the post-industrialized world has increased the proportion of the economy that is devoted to providing services to people. It has also increased the proportion of work that is done with people through various sorts of workgroups. Working with people enhances employees’ experience of work life by increasing opportunities for pleasant social contact and access to the knowledge, skills, and social capital of their colleagues and clients. Working with people also increases the amount of uncertainty employees encounter in their jobs. The interdependencies in the work of team members can make work more interesting but can also increase distress when the contributions of others to a shared project arrive late or lack the expected quality. Working with others requires employees to have the capacity to collaborate, to lead, and to follow. Technical or analytical skills provide only part of the solution to an effective worklife. Social skills increase in importance in the context of contemporary work. As a result, the increasingly social nature of work brings with it both additional resources and additional demands.

Another challenge inherent in team-based work is that job feedback becomes more complex. Clear feedback has been long established as an important contributor to employees’ experience of motivating, fulfilling work (Hackman & Oldham, 1976). With many people contributing to a patient’s treatment or an application’s design, the line from an individual’s contribution to a specific outcome becomes blurred. Further, much of contemporary work is inconclusive: people contribute to complex projects that rarely have clear-cut outcomes. Large-scale projects in international finance, information technology, or communications rarely produce a definitive product. For example, agencies constantly update information on unemployment rates, and computer operating systems regularly execute updates. In contrast to a crafts model that permits a concentrated focus on producing a complete, refined product, employees attend meetings, analyze data, and contribute to reports of no apparent consequence.

Furthermore, contemporary work has become increasingly portable. A variety of gizmos carry information along with the capacity to analyze. Maintaining a clear boundary between work and personal life requires deliberate action from employees. Communication technology not only enables employers or clients to contact employees anywhere, it also allows employees to continue working on unresolved projects when they would be better served by a complete break from work (Derks et al., in press). People can become trapped in a continuous cycle attempting to address the inherent lack of closure in contemporary work (Derks & Bakker, in press).

Another strain in contemporary worklife is uncertainty. Since the financial crisis of 2008, job security feels more tenuous (Burke, 2012). Beyond short-term concerns, there are challenges to the financial viability of private pension funds, municipal governments, or even national governments to meet their obligations to retired workers. As pension plans shift from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans, employees face increasing uncertainty (Broadbent et al., 2006). (Defined benefit plans commit the pension to a certain payment to retirees while defined contribution plans only designate the employees’ pension contributions, leaving the eventual payment to be defined by the pension fund’s eventual earnings.) With high levels of youth unemployment, families have greater uncertainty about their future aspirations. Austerity programs are immediate in delivering short-term pain and slow to convey long-term gain. In the USA and Europe, state and municipal governments have taken positions that show antipathy against public sector employees, challenging their job security, compensation, and pensions (Befort, 2012). The change in the psychological contract of employees with their employers generates uncertainty for employees’ future wellbeing, productivity, and career development (Burke, 2012).

Financial challenges and greater uncertainty are not the only unintended consequences of organizational restructuring. As upper-level managers strive to address steady or growing demands with shrinking resources, they often resort to restructuring organizations or departments (Ashman, 2013; McKenzie, 2012; Teo et al., 2012). The demands of adjusting to a restructured work environment, including the uncertainty inherent in such changes, have been linked to job burnout in various countries (Allisey, Rodwell, & Noblet, 2012; Carter et al., 2013; Raftopoulos et al., 2012). In addition to their demands on employees’ overall energy, restructuring initiatives often challenge employees’ professional values. Despite assurances that changes will maintain or even enhance service quality, employees experience the changes as steps towards reducing service quality.

In sum, this brief overview of the challenges facing employees at the time of writing (September, 2013) identifies factors with a potential for engendering career crises among employees worldwide. As international and national political/economic systems adjust to system-level strains, they create tensions on organizations and workgroups that eventually affect individuals.

A call for action

Research reports on burnout have consistently called for action to develop strategies to prevent and alleviate the syndrome. Despite both reasoned and impassioned calls for action, progress has been modest. The progress that has occurred provides a solid foundation for future work, but much remains to be accomplished.

Work engagement

Work engagement has provided a positive target for burnout interventions. The simple goal of eliminating burnout fails to specify what will take its place. When people recover from burnout, will they experience a state of calm indifference or of energetic enthusiasm? It is likely that most employees and all employers would prefer the latter outcome.

Maslach and Leiter (1997) identified engagement with work as a positive alternative to burnout. First, they noted that surveys of health care organizations showed a full range of experiences from constant exhaustion on the burnout end of the continuum to a complete lack of exhaustion on the other end. Second, the distributions were skewed towards the positive end of the scale. Third, they noted that the distribution did not show a clear cut-off indicating a distinct state of burnout: did the term, burnout, apply to the top 50 percent on the exhaustion scale or the top 1 percent?

They proposed that it was more constructive to identify a positive alternative to burnout than to simply divide the world into those who were experiencing burnout and those who were not. The concept of work engagement has been elaborated extensively since that time (e.g., Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004), including the development of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (Schaufeli et al., 2006). The Job-Demand Resources model (JD-R; Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; 2014) has articulated a framework for identifying distinct and shared qualities of burnout and engagement.

A positive target for intervention makes such initiatives more appealing to employers and focuses intervention design on constructive results. A constructive target for interventions reduces the risk inherent in organizational change. Although participants may agree on the importance of reducing burnout and its unfortunate impact on health, fulfillment, and productivity, participants appreciate knowing that the intervention will promote constructive qualities as well.

This book explores some of the core issues in burnout intervention. As Leiter and Maslach (2000) have argued, effective intervention is furthered by knowing the leverage points (Maslach & Leiter, 2008). These are aspects of organizational life, management practices, or working relationships that have a close relationship to burnout. Changing the leverage points imposes an imbalance in the network of relationships that maintains the status quo for people experiencing distress at work. For example, changing the extent to which employees experience improvements in a manageable workload or meaningful recognition is likely to reduce feelings of exhaustion or increase efficacy. Background research in burnout helps to identify effective leverage points. The second feature of effective intervention is focusing on what can be changed. For example, an organization undergoing a sharp increase in client demands may lack ways of making workload more manageable but may be able to increase recognition for employees’ extraordinary efforts.

Knowledge translation

An ongoing issue for applied psychology is the process of translating research findings and the research process to accommodate the interests and concerns of the general working public. Job burnout is not solely an academic topic, it is also a practical concern for working people, managers, and the larger community. Meaningful field research and intervention testing require an enthusiastic and sustained cooperation both within and beyond the academic world.

One level of knowledge translation is a communication strategy that includes messages directed toward research participants and their counterparts in their industry. Through writing, speaking, and media interviews, researchers convey their findings in accessible language to a broad audience outside of the world of academic journals and conferences.

A deeper level of knowledge translation begins with conversations before the research begins. For example, the research discussed in this book about the CREW intervention (see Chapter 8) had its beginning in conversations that included researchers with chief nursing officers of hospitals who identified the problem. Hospitals had units characterized by poor collegiality and their efforts to address this problem were not having the desired impact. They actively sought help in developing a new approach that would address relationship problems and inspire greater engagement with work. Having organizational leaders involved from the problem definition through the process of defining the methodology, implementation, analysis, and reporting assures that knowledge will transfer. Researchers learn from the practitioners and practitioners learn from the researchers. Progress toward making a change in burnout requires such partnerships to thrive.

Overview of the book

A noteworthy theme across the contributions in this book is the sophisticated level of research conducted on job burnout. The field clearly reflects progression from general questions to focused explorations of processes. Research on job burnout has evolved beyond linking the syndrome with antecedents and consequences. The three major foci of burnout research in the early twenty-first century are: (1) delving into the processes through which burnout changes over time, (2) the role of social relationships in the burnout process, and (3) the processes through which the syndrome can be alleviated. These three streams of research focus have multiple branches that are reflected in the chapters of this book.

In Chapter 2, “Burnout and health,” Kirsi Ahola and Jari Hakanen begin with conclusive evidence of burnout’s relationships to health problems. The authors go beyond acknowledging the connection between burnout and health to review prospective studies designed to untangle the pathways underlying this relationship. They identify studies that have supplemented self-report measures of health with independent sources of institutional or health system data. Their review confirms the value of a multi-dimensional burnout construct in that exhaustion has a more clear-cut relationship with health outcomes than do the other two dimensions of burnout. A one-dimensional measure would miss this nuance. Another important issue within their review is the complex causal framework of burnout and health. They supplement the more common structure of burnout leading to health problems with research that has considered the potential of health problems contributing to the subsequent development of burnout. The growing evidence for both directions of influence (burnout to health problems and health problems to burnout) suggests that the field can move beyond evaluating “reversed causality” to considering complex models with reciprocal relationships over time. That is, the phrase, “reversed causality,” implies processes that run contrary to an established unidirectional causal path. Increasingly, evidence supports models in which multi-directional influences maintain balance among elements. Within this context it is clear that reporting a simple correlation between exhaustion and health problems would no longer be considered an advancement of knowledge. Progress calls for deeper explorations on the mechanisms through which health problems and exhaustion influence one another.

The chapter by Despoina Xanthopoulou and Laurenz Meier, “Daily burnout experiences: critical events and measurement challenges,” examines burnout processes with the close lens provided through daily diary studies. The authors argue that the long-term stability of burnout permits considerable within-person variation within and across workdays. The multiple assessments within a diary format permit researchers to test complex models of reciprocal causation that put aside a structure of antecedents and consequences to depict ongoing sequences of events and experiences that characterize employees’ experience of their worklife. They point out that the burst design that encompasses a series of daily diaries separated by longer periods have a ...