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Conquering Burnout

DOI:10.1038/scientificamericanmind0115-30
Authors:
Michael Leiter at Deakin University
Michael Leiter
Christina Maslach at University of California, Berkeley
Christina Maslach
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Abstract

Job satisfaction is a surprisingly fragile state. Here's how to protect yourself against the top contributors to burnout
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... For instance, at the school level, policies that optimise structural job demands and resources should be promoted. Teachers could be supervised to develop job resources that foster engagement and help them to more successfully cope with their job demands (Leiter & Maslach, 2015). At individual level, different recovery strategies, such as social and physical activities, as well as activities like reading, listening to music etc. may be useful for teachers' relaxation and psychological detachment from work (Bakker, Demerouti, Oerlemans, & Sonnentag, 2013). ...
Understanding teacher well-being: a cross-lagged analysis of burnout, negative student-related emotions, psychopathological symptoms, and resilience
Article
  • Mar 2019
This study is aimed at testing the reciprocal relationships between teacher burnout, psychopathological symptoms, and negative student-related emotions, and to explore the protective role of resilience in these aspects of teachers’ psychological well-being. A study based on a two-wave panel design was conducted among 941 school teachers at two points in time with a time lag of approximately 6 months. Structural equation modelling was employed to investigate the cross-lagged relations between study variables across time. The obtained results highlighted the adverse effect of burnout in predicting teachers’ subsequent emotions and psychopathological symptoms. Teachers with higher burnout levels assessed at Time 1, also had higher levels of negative emotions towards their students and more psychopathological symptoms than at Time 2. Finally, the higher levels of perceived resilience predicted lower levels of negative emotions, burnout, and psychopathological symptoms, but only when assessed at the same time point.
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... This could be due to uncertainties about meaningfulness of the own work and subsequent lack of fulfilment at work (57,58) in this group. Often such employees report insufficient feedback, information and advice from the colleagues, management and patients and complain a lack of autonomy and of reasonable latitude for own decision-making (53,56,59). ...
Influence of gender, working field and psychosocial factors on the vulnerability for burnout in mental hospital staff: Results of an Austrian cross-sectional study
Article
  • Aug 2017
Introduction: According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), hospitals represent a work environment with high job strain. Prolonged perceived occupational stress may result in symptoms of burnout, such as emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalisation (DP) and reduced personal accomplishment (PA). Understanding which factors may reduce vulnerability for burnout is an important requirement for well-targeted occupational stress prevention in mental hospital staff. Objective: To identify the influence of gender, age, working field, family structure, education, voluntarily occupational training during holidays and length of stay on job on occupational stress perception. Methods: In a cross-sectional design, 491 employees (311 female, 180 male) of an Austrian mental health centre participated in the study. The extent of perceived occupational stress was assessed by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) with the scales for emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment. Participants were divided according to their working field in those working with/without patients. Findings: Prevalence of emotional exhaustion was higher in women working with patients compared to men working with patients (25% vs. 18%, p = 0.003). Age above 45 years was significantly associated with decreased vulnerability for burnout in men (EE p = 0.040, DP p = 0.010, PA p = 0.007), but not in women. A lower level of education had a significant impact on depersonalisation in both sexes (p = 0.001 for men, p = 0.048 for women). Length of stay on job showed a significant influence on emotional exhaustion. No significant relationship was found between family structure and vulnerability for burnout. Conclusion: Gender had a differential effect on perceived occupational stress indicating a need for gender-tailored preventive strategies. Age, working field, education, voluntarily occupational training during holidays and length of stay on job affect vulnerability for burnout in mental hospital staff.
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... Cynicism seems to be more linked to the job environment, in terms of the poor quality of social relationships at work and the lack of critical resources, all of which can lead to reduced job satisfaction and poor job performance. This pattern is underscored by the references to incivility, "socially toxic workplaces," and poor treatment of clients, in various discussions of burnout (Holm, Torkelson, & Bäckström, 2016;Leiter & Maslach, 2015). As noted earlier, the role of cynicism was a major theme of the early qualitative research on burnout, and so it is somewhat surprising that there has been a relative neglect of theory and research that could further elucidate what is going on here. ...
Latent burnout profiles: A new approach to understanding the burnout experience
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2016
Latent profile analysis, with two large datasets, was used to identify multiple person-centered profiles across the burnout – engagement continuum, as assessed by the three dimensions of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). Five profiles emerged from this analysis: Burnout (high on all three dimensions), Engagement (low on all three), Overextended (high on exhaustion only), Disengaged (high on cynicism only), and Ineffective (high on inefficacy only). Each of these profiles showed a different pattern of correlates with organizational variables. The Disengaged profile was more negative than Overextended, and closer to the Burnout profile, which argues against the use of exhaustion alone as a proxy for burnout. The results have important implications for theory, research, and interventions.
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Work-Related Burnout on Psychological Well-Being among Public School Teachers: Resilience as Moderating Factor
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2023
Education being one of the cornerstones of the Philippines, teachers may experience pressure and burnout from carrying the workload and responsibilities of being second to parents being the steppingstone for the development of young children. This study used a moderation analysis research design to examine if resilience moderates the relationship between work-related burnout and psychological well-being. Using a non-probability purposive sampling technique, over 233 Filipino public elementary school teachers from Quezon City, Philippines, participated. Results revealed a substantial negative relationship between psychological well-being and work-related burnout, and a positive relationship exists between resilience and psychological well-being. Furthermore, linear regression analysis showed that work-related burnout negatively predicted psychological well-being. Moreover, this study found that resilience does not moderate the association between work-related burnout and psychological well-being among public elementary school teachers.
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Ethically Aligned Opportunistic Scheduling for Productive Laziness
Conference Paper
  • Jan 2019
In artificial intelligence (AI) mediated workforce management systems (e.g., crowdsourcing), long-term success depends on workers accomplishing tasks productively and resting well. This dual objective can be summarized by the concept of productive laziness. Existing scheduling approaches mostly focus on efficiency but overlook worker wellbeing through proper rest. In order to enable workforce management systems to follow the IEEE Ethically Aligned Design guidelines to prioritize worker wellbeing, we propose a distributed Computational Productive Laziness (CPL) approach in this paper. It intelligently recommends personalized work-rest schedules based on local data concerning a worker's capabilities and situational factors to incorporate opportunistic resting and achieve superlinear collective productivity without the need for explicit coordination messages. Extensive experiments based on a real-world dataset of over 5,000 workers demonstrate that CPL enables workers to spend 70% of the effort to complete 90% of the tasks on average, providing more ethically aligned scheduling than existing approaches.
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