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by CHRISTINA MASLACH &MICHAEL P. LEITER
www.ssireview.com STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW 43
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVIES & STARR/GETTY IMAGES
MARK1IS EXHAUSTED. AS A COMMITTED ENVIRON-
mental activist, he logs hundreds of pro bono hours every year
organizing rallies, circulating petitions, raising funds, lobbying
legislators, and campaigning for like-minded politicians. And
that’s not even his day job; Mark is also pursuing a full-time career
to pay the bills.
“I’m feeling totally overwhelmed by the immensity of the
problems we face,” he says, “but I keep pushing myself. It’s like
an anorexic getting thin. When you’re an activist, you’re never
working hard enough.”
Lately, though, Mark’s passion has been increasingly tainted
with bitterness. “I sometimes look at the stuff I have to do and
I get angry,” he says. “Like, why doesn’t somebody else do
some of it? Why is it just me?” Mark is also disturbed to find him-
self muttering, “Oh, a pox on them” when he thinks about the
communities he is trying to help. “They don’t want to save
themselves,” he continues, “so why should I go out of my
way?”
Susan is also bitter. After five years as an emergency depart-
ment physician at St. Joseph Hospital, she still feels left out of
the tight-knit team of ER staff. “I need to be included in dis-
cussions about patients, diagnoses, and interventions,” she says,
“and I need a meaningful voice in decisions on medical practice
in this ER.” Yet neither is happening.
The other doctors – all men – have extended their circle to
include the ER nurses and assistants. But they don’t seem to
know what to do with Susan. Instead of treating her as their
equal, they make important decisions without consulting her,
disrespecting her status and abilities.
In turn, Susan doesn’t know what to do with her male col-
leagues. “I can’t get into the flirty banter that goes on between
the male doctors and nurses,” says Susan. “That isn’t the way I
REVERSING
BURNOUT
How to rekindle your passion for your work
operate, and it doesn’t go with my
responsibilities as a doctor.”
And so recently, Susan finds that
the usual aches and pains of a long
day’s work are now paired with a
deeper, more troubling feeling: She
just doesn’t care about what she is
doing. This dullness of heart scares
Susan. If she can’t count on her sen-
sitivity to patients, she can’t be con-
fident of her work.
Both Mark and Susan are suffer-
ing from burnout. Far more than
feeling blue or having a bad day, burnout is a chronic problem.
Burned-out people often feel exhausted and overwhelmed like
Mark, self-doubting and anxious like Susan, and bitter and cyn-
ical like both of them.
Burnout reflects an uneasy relationship between people
and their work. Like relationship problems between two peo-
ple, those between people and their work usually indicate a bad
fit between the two, rather than just individual weaknesses, or
just evil workplaces. And so reversing burnout requires focus-
ing on both individuals and their organizations to bring them
back into sync with each other.2
Beating burnout is not just a matter of reducing the number
of negatives. Indeed, sometimes there is not a lot you can do about
the negative aspects of work. Instead, it is often more useful to
think about increasing the number of positives, and of building
the opposite of burnout, engagement. When burnout is coun-
teracted with engagement, exhaustion is replaced with enthusi-
asm, bitterness with compassion, and anxiety with efficacy.
The Six Areas of Burnout
How do individuals and organizations move from burnout to
engagement? How do they make sense of what’s going wrong,
and figure out how to make things right? Our surveys and inter-
views of more than 10,000 people across a wide range of orga-
nizations in several different countries have revealed that most
person-job mismatches fall into six categories: workload (too
much work, not enough resources); control (micromanage-
ment, lack of influence, accountability without power); reward
(not enough pay, acknowledgment, or satisfaction); community
(isolation, conflict, disrespect); fairness (discrimination,
favoritism); and values (ethical conflicts, meaningless tasks).3
We originally developed this six-category framework as a way
of organizing the vast research literature on burnout. Our sub-
sequent work then showed that both individuals and organi-
zations could use the framework to diagnose which categories
are especially troublesome for them, and then to design inter-
ventions that target these problem areas.4The six-area frame-
work has now been incorporated into assessment programs for
organizations5and for individuals.6(See sidebar on p. 48 for
more about the individual assessment.)
To fix burnout, individuals and organizations must first
identify the areas in which their mismatches lie, and then tai-
lor solutions to improve the fit within each area. In Mark’s
case, his core problem is work overload. Workers in the non-
profit sector are distinctly vulnerable to work overload for two
reasons. First, nonprofit organizations may often have fewer
resources than organizations in other sectors, leaving workers
with too little time and too few tools with which to handle their
workload. Second, nonprofit employees have high expecta-
tions and are attempting to solve truly monumental problems.
Their idealism can lead them to overextend themselves and take
on too much.
Mark is also experiencing an imbalance in the area of values.
Although workers in the nonprofit sector may not face the same
ethical dilemmas that many workers in for-profit companies
do, they often feel value conflicts of a different sort: between the
loftiness of their ideals and the realities of their day-to-day work.
44 STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW www.ssireview.com
CHRISTINA MASLACH is a professor of psychology and the vice
provost for undergraduate education at the University of California,
Berkeley. She has conducted research in social and health psychology, and
is best known as a pioneering researcher on job burnout and as the author
of the widely used Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).
MICHAEL P. LEITER is a professor of psychology at Acadia University
in Canada and director of the Centre for Organizational Research &
Development, which applies high-quality research methods to human
resource issues that confront organizations. He holds the Canada Research
Chair in Occupational Health and Wellness at Acadia University.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN PUMFREY/GETTY IMAGES
“It’s like an
anorexic
getting
thin. When
you’re an
activist,
you’re
never
working
hard
enough.”
www.ssireview.com STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW 45
Burnout in a Crisis
How Katrina relief workers are faring
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina,
Jan Wawrzyniak worked 15 hours
a day for seven days straight,
answering calls from people who
were stranded or searching for
relatives. Calls from New Orleans to 2-
1-1, the nationwide human services
referral phone line, were being for-
warded to her United Way office in
Monroe, La. She was suddenly cata-
pulted from administrator to crisis
operator, fielding hundreds of urgent
requests for shelter, supplies, food,
and funds. “I was sleeping three hours
a night and eventually had a melt-
down. I just couldn’t stop crying,”
Wawrzyniak says.
She was suffering from the kind of
burnout that many people working in
intense and prolonged disaster situa-
tions face. For her and thousands of
other relief workers in the Katrina
effort, workload and control issues
(see main article) packed the hardest
punch. Too many problems to handle
in too short a time – with inadequate
resources and hand-tying bureaucra-
cies – made things rough for profes-
sionals and volunteers alike.
“Before we expanded to a 50-per-
son station, it was chaos,” says
Wawrzyniak of the Monroe outpost,
which has fielded about 56,000 Kat-
rina calls. “People telephoned in dire
straits, and you’d feel frantic trying to
get them what they needed – only to
realize it wasn’t working. One man
said he was running out of diapers for
his baby. He was considering breaking
into the local Wal-Mart and leaving an
IOU. It was heartbreaking.”
Jack Slattery, a former Peace Corps
volunteer, helped the Federal Emer-
gency Management Agency (FEMA) set
up a disaster recovery center in
Bogalusa, La., and worked with hurri-
cane victims filing for financial assis-
tance. “FEMA told us it would be emo-
tionally draining, and it was,” says
Slattery. “So many needs and so few
resources.” After a month of working
12-hour days, he was ready to go home.
“One of the things that made the
job challenging was FEMA itself,” Slat-
tery says. “Orders came from above,
military style, and there was an unwill-
ingness to move the most urgent
requests up the system.” Slattery also
says that FEMA’s rules governing which
Katrina victims received $2,000 aid
grants seemed capricious, and fre-
quently neglected the poorest and
neediest. “It was frustrating to work in
such an environment,” he says.
Slattery personally coped by taking
morning walks, waking up every day
at 6 a.m. “It helped me release stress,”
he says. He also vented his emotions to
his wife and other workers.
Wawrzyniak’s 2-1-1 operation insti-
tuted rotating schedules so that every-
one could take at least one day a
week off. The center also made crisis
counselors available to workers on
every shift.
Such techniques are recommended
by the American Psychological Associa-
tion, which regularly provides mental
health workers to the American Red
Cross for disaster relief efforts. “The
Red Cross approach used to be: Work
until the job gets done,” says Richard
Heaps, a psychologist who helped
organize counseling services for Kat-
rina victims in September. “Giving
workers periods of rest to recover their
energies makes them better able to
serve others,” he says.
Or, as flight attendants say, put the
mask on your own face before
attempting to assist others.
–Marguerite Rigoglioso
Where to start? Hurricane relief workers find coping with disaster overwhelming with-
out care for themselves.
PHOTOGRAPH BY NICHOLAS KAMM/GETTY IMAGES
This is what is going on with Mark, who often feels so bogged
down in the details of organizing volunteers and coordinating
actions that he loses sight of the larger goal of environmental
preservation. His work no longer feels meaningful to him.
Mark also feels a lot of dissatisfaction in the area of rewards.
No one goes into the nonprofit sector to get rich, but Mark
expected to enjoy his activist activities more. He also expected
more appreciation and praise from his colleagues and from
the communities he serves.
In contrast, Susan’s core problem is in the area of commu-
nity.7In her work setting, she is excluded from her colleagues’
circle of support, and she spends a lot of time feeling isolated
and lonely. Being left out of the loop introduces a second mis-
match for Susan, this time in the area of control. By the time
an issue appears on a meeting’s formal agenda, the matter has
already been settled in the informal conversations in which
Susan could not participate. As a result, Susan does not feel that
she has an adequate say in how she does her work.
As time wears on, Susan has begun to suspect that her lack
of community and control at work are due to a third area of mis-
match: fairness. She wonders whether the male doctors in the
ER are discriminating against her because she is a woman.
Because of this hint of injustice, Susan feels not only anxious
and uncertain about how best to do her job, but also angry and
hostile toward her colleagues.
Two Paths to Engagement
There are two paths to banishing burnout: the individual path,
and the organizational path. Both Mark and Susan took indi-
vidual approaches; they first identified the mismatches leading
to their burnout, and then enlisted their colleagues and orga-
nizations in addressing those mismatches.8
An organizational approach, in contrast, starts with man-
agement first identifying mismatches that are commonly shared,
and then connecting with individuals to narrow these person-
organization gaps.9The sidebar (left) describes how this orga-
nizational approach was used in a large organization. This strat-
egy of working collaboratively on shared problems can be
used in organizations of any size, even those nonprofits that are
small and that have limited resources.
No matter the path to engagement, it is important to keep
in mind that positive changes don’t just happen. Instead, peo-
ple must take action, and well-informed action, at that. Rather
than assumptions and “best guesses” about what the problem
is, the six-area diagnostic tool can help pinpoint it more accu-
rately. Solutions that don’t address the problem can be worse
than no solutions at all.
For example, we recall attending a meeting of teachers for
which the school superintendent had hired a motivational
speaker to inspire them and help them deal with stress. As the
speaker reeled off stories from his own days as an athletic
46 STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW www.ssireview.com
An Organizational
Approach to
Healing Burnout
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, THE BUSINESS AND
administrative services division of a large nonprofit
institution was facing serious troubles. Its talented
workforce had become demoralized and burned-
out, and no wonder. The organization’s manage-
ment corps was minimally trained. Its far-flung departments
had trouble communicating with each other. Its 17 depart-
ments had become 17 silos, rarely collaborating. There were
almost as many organizational strategies as there were staff
members. And to top it all off, the organization lacked
important resources.
The division’s management decided to use our organi-
zational checkup survey to measure burnout across the six
areas. All employees were given the opportunity to fill out
this probing questionnaire, which was locally retitled the
“Let’s Hear It! Survey.” Ninety percent of the 1,100 staff
replied with gusto, adding reams of free-form comments.
Administering the survey, we observed many telling
moments. In a particularly troubled wing of the organiza-
tion, six supervisors refused to take the survey as long as
their common manager was in the room. About 70 staff
took the survey in one of five languages other than Eng-
lish. (Oral translation was provided in Spanish, Cantonese,
Laotian, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.) These staff members,
for whom English was a second (or third) language,
showed remarkable enthusiasm for the survey – the first
time ever that they had been invited to communicate in
the workplace in their native language.
The survey results showed that the biggest problem
areas were fairness and values. For instance, the staff felt
that favoritism guided promotions, and that a special
bonus program was not actually based on merit. Employ-
ees from every frontline unit were formed into commit-
tees, charged with examining the survey results for their
unit and with developing initiatives for change. One com-
mittee, for example, worked to develop a distinguished
service award that would be judged as a fair way to
reward people who had made exceptional contributions
to the organization’s goals. A year later, a second survey
showed that these changes had led to successful improve-
ments in all six areas, but especially the targeted ones of
fairness and values.
–Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
www.ssireview.com STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW 47
coach, we watched the teachers sitting silently,
their venom rising with each minute. They did not
lack motivation. Decent pay, adequate supplies,
parents’ support, a manageable workload, yes. But
not motivation. The superintendent’s well-mean-
ing attempt to nip burnout in the bud only nur-
tured it.
Lightening Mark’s Load
Having identified workload as his main relation-
ship problem with his work, Mark is finding ways
to relax during strenuous times. He now takes reg-
ular breaks in which he gets away from the job,
either physically (e.g., by jogging around the
neighborhood) or mentally (e.g., by reading a
book that has nothing to do with his activist inter-
ests). Even more effective for him are temporary
changes in work, in which he “downshifts” to
some less demanding task (e.g., taking care of
routine paperwork, sweeping the floor) before
returning to the more challenging jobs.
Another critical discovery for Mark is that he
really didn’t have to be the center of his activist uni-
verse. Instead of being the lone person who does
everything, he is learning to delegate tasks, to
train others to do what he did, and to get them to
share the responsibility. “Now I don’t struggle
against the feeling of burnout,” he says. “I’ll say
to myself: ‘Oh, I’m burned out, I’ll just sit here for
a while. Let somebody else do it.’ And you know
what? Somebody else does.”
Mark’s new perspective on his place in his
activist organization reflects the wisdom of an
older colleague who told him: “When I was
younger, I was convinced that I needed to drive
myself every single minute. Now I feel that I can
go to the sauna, and I’ll still hate imperialism in
an hour and a half. And that’s helped me to stay
an activist.”
By addressing his workload problem, Mark has simultane-
ously improved the fit between him and his activist work on the
dimension of value. To relieve stress, he took several long hikes
in the wilderness, which renewed his feelings of awe at the
beauty of nature – feelings that fueled his commitment to envi-
ronmental activism in the first place. “I felt in love. It was a pas-
sion I hadn’t felt in a long time. There was very little burnout.
Instead there was a craving.”
Building Susan’s Community
After zeroing in on community as her primary area of self-work
mismatch, Susan first took a few minutes at the start of her next
shift to talk with Tom, one of the most approachable of the doc-
tors. Tom told Susan that he was amazed that she could feel left
out, and assured her that no one intended to exclude her. Susan
didn’t quite buy Tom’s assurances, but nevertheless replied
that she was pleased to hear this, because she certainly didn’t
want to go through the complicated, time-consuming, and
awkward process of making a formal complaint. She was con-
fident that before too long, the ER doctors’ clique would know
all about their conversation.
Susan took the second step toward narrowing the gap
between her expectations and her work reality at the next
meeting of the ER medical staff. She told the staff that she was
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAD WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
“It’s not just about working with the
patients. It’s also about taking on
colleagues and relationships to make
sure you’re included and respected.”
feeling left out of important decisions, and requested that they
include her in all discussions about clinical matters and hospi-
tal issues during her shift. There were a few furtive glances, but
overall most people nodded and said, “Of course.”
With Tom and a few other doctors, Susan has smoothly
moved into relaxed conversations. She refers to her feelings of
burnout only within the context of working on better ways of
working together. With the other doctors, it has been more of
an uphill battle, but is still an improvement over silence. Since
Susan took her complaints to her colleagues, there have been
a lot fewer surprises at medical staff meetings, making Susan
feel like she has more say in her work environment. She also now
realizes that the doctors’ previous exclusive patterns were more
a matter of thoughtlessness than a concerted campaign to
exclude her – thereby assuaging her fears of sexism.
Feeling that she is part of a community, respected, and in con-
trol is giving Susan a renewed enthusiasm for her work. The end
of the shift brings the same familiar pattern of aches and pains
from the hours on her feet. But the dullness of feeling is now rare.
“Looking back now, I’m shocked to think of how close I was
to losing my connection to the work that I love and that I do
very well,” she says. “It’s not just about working with the
48 STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW www.ssireview.com
Quick Burnout Assessment
To give an idea of how we assess burnout, here are a few items from our book, “Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for
Improving Your Relationship With Work.” Please note, however, that this is not a complete survey.
For each item, think about how your current work matches up with your personal preferences, work patterns, and
aspirations.
Just Right Mismatch Major Mismatch
Workload
The amount of work to complete in a day
The frequency of surprising, unexpected events
Control
My participation in decisions that affect my work
The quality of leadership from upper management
Reward
Recognition for achievements from my supervisor
Opportunities for bonuses or raises
Community
The frequency of supportive interactions at work
The closeness of personal friendships at work
Fairness
Management’s dedication to giving everyone equal consideration
Clear and open procedures for allocating rewards and promotions
Values
The potential of my work to contribute to the larger community
My confidence that the organization’s mission is meaningful
• If everything is a match, you have found an excellent setting for your work
• A few mismatches are not very surprising. People are usually willing and able to tolerate them
• A lot of mismatches, and especially major mismatches in areas that are very important to you, are signs of a potentially
intolerable situation
www.ssireview.com STANFORD SOCIAL INNOVATION REVIEW 49
patients. It’s taking on colleagues and
relationships to make sure you’re
included and respected.”
By confronting the situation in an
informed and focused way, Susan has
been able to repair the relationship
between herself and her work. An
important principle in Susan’s situation
is that unfair treatment is difficult to sus-
tain after it has been brought into the
open. There were no defensible grounds
for excluding Susan from professional
discussions at work. But the situation
persisted until Susan called her col-
leagues on their actions.
Shining On
Mark and Susan have had different expe-
riences of burnout, reflecting the unique qualities of their work
settings. Each situation involved a different area of mismatch,
and each called for distinct solutions. Note that neither attempted
to address all of their mismatches at once. Rather, each first iden-
tified and addressed his or her core area of concern.
Both had also begun to feel the personal costs of burnout,
which include poorer health and strained private lives. But at
least as important, Mark’s and Susan’s organizations had also
begun to suffer. When employees shift to minimum perfor-
mance, minimum standards of working, and minimum pro-
duction quality, rather than performing at their best, they
make more errors, become less thorough, and have less cre-
ativity for solving problems. They are also less committed to
the organization and less willing to go the extra mile to make
a real difference.
Burnout is not a problem of individuals but of the social envi-
ronment in which they work. Workplaces shape how people
interact with one another and how they carry out their jobs.
When the workplace does not recognize the human side of
work, and there are major mismatches between the nature of
the job and the nature of people, there will be a greater risk of
burnout. A good understanding of burnout, its dynamics, and
what to do to overcome it is therefore an essential part of stay-
ing true to the pursuit of a noble cause, and keeping the flame
of compassion and dedication burning brightly.
1 “Mark” and “Susan” are pseudonyms.
2 For our review of the psychological literature on burnout, see Maslach, C.,
Schaufeli, W.B., & Leiter, M.P. “Job Burnout,” in Annual Review of Psychology 52,
eds. S.T. Fiske, D.L. Schacter, & C. Zahn-Waxler (2001): 397-422.
3 Maslach, C. & Leiter, M.P. The Truth About Bur nout (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1997).
4 Leiter, M.P. & Maslach, C. “Areas of Work life: A Structured Approach to Organi-
zational Predictors of Job Burnout,” in Research in Occupational Stress and Well-
Being 3, eds. P.L. Perrewe & D.C. Ganster (Oxford: Elsevier, 2004): 91-134.
5 Leiter, M.P. & Maslach, C. Preventing Burnout and Building Engagement: A Complete
Program for Organizational Renewal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
6 Leiter, M.P. & Maslach, C. Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for Improving Your Rela-
tionship With Work (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005).
7 See also De Jonge, J. & Kompier, M.A.J. “A Critical Examination of the Demand-
Control-Support Model From a Work Psychological Perspective,” International
Journal of Stress Management 4 (1997): 235-258.
8 Leiter & Maslach, Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for Improving Your Relationship
With Work.
9 Leiter & Maslach, Preventing Burnout and Building Engagement: A Complete Program
for Organizational Renewal.
TALK BACK: What are your reactions to
this article? Join our online forum at
www.ssireview.com/forum.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TOM COLLICOTT
A good
understanding
of burnout is
essential to
keeping the flame
of compassion
and dedication
burning brightly.
