Burnout Assessment

Introduction

Job burnout is a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. It has been recognized as an occupational hazard for various people-oriented professions, such as human services, education, and health care. Recently, as other occupations have become more oriented to customer service, and as global economic realities have changed organizations, the phenomenon of burnout has become relevant in these areas as well. Burnout is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. The standard measure that is used to assess these three dimensions is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI).

As a reliably identifiable job stress syndrome, burnout places the individual stress experience within a larger organizational context of people's relation to their work. Interventions to alleviate burnout and to promote its opposite, engagement with work, can occur at both organizational and personal levels. The social focus of burnout, the solid research basis concerning the syndrome, and its specific ties to the work domain make a distinct and valuable contribution to people's health and well-being.

Conceptualization

Burnout is a psychological syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy in the workplace. It is an individual stress experience embedded in a context of complex social relationships, and it involves the person's conception of both self and others on the job. Unlike unidimensional models of stress, this multidimensional model [Page 151]conceptualizes burnout in terms of its three core components.

Exhaustion refers to feelings of being over-extended and depleted of one's emotional and physical resources. Workers feel drained and used up, without any source of replenishment. They lack enough energy to face another day or another person in need. The exhaustion component represents the basic individual stress dimension of burnout.

Cynicism refers to a negative, hostile, or excessively detached response to the job, which often includes a loss of idealism. It usually develops in response to the overload of emotional exhaustion, and is self-protective at first – an emotional buffer of ‘detached concern’. But the risk is that the detachment can turn into dehumanization. The cynicism component represents the interpersonal dimension of burnout.

Inefficacy refers to a decline in feelings of competence and productivity at work. People experience a growing sense of inadequacy about their ability to do the job well, and this may result in a self-imposed verdict of failure. The inefficacy component represents the self-evaluation dimension of burnout.

What has been distinctive about burnout is the interpersonal framework of the phenomenon. The centrality of relationships at work – whether it be relationships with clients, colleagues or supervisors – has always been at the heart of descriptions of burnout. These relationships are the source of both emotional strains and rewards, they can be a resource for coping with job stress, and they often bear the brunt of the negative effects of burnout. Thus, if one were to look at burnout out of context, and simply focus on the individual exhaustion component, one would lose sight of the phenomenon entirely.

In this regard, the multidimensional theory is a distinct improvement over prior unidimensional models of burnout because it both incorporates the single dimension (exhaustion), and extends it by adding two other dimensions: response toward others (cynicism) and response toward self (inefficacy). The inclusion of these two dimensions add something over and above the notion of an individual stress response and make burnout much broader than established ideas of occupational stress.

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