{"id":77,"date":"2020-05-07T00:42:33","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T00:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/?p=77"},"modified":"2020-05-07T00:51:52","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T00:51:52","slug":"the-truth-about-burnout-a-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/2020\/05\/07\/the-truth-about-burnout-a-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth About Burnout: A Critique"},"content":{"rendered":"

Burnout is defined by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter in The Truth About Burnout\u00a0(1997)<\/em> as a \u201cgradual process of loss during which the mismatch between the needs of the person and the demands of the job grows ever greater\u201d and is characterized by three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. The six sources of burnout are work overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, unfairness, breakdown of community, and value conflict\u00a0(Maslach & Leiter, 1997). Maslach and Leiter (1997) go on to say the blame for burnout has traditionally been placed on the individual, when it is more likely a symptom of the organization\u2019s ability to mitigate the six sources. Lastly, The Truth About Burnout<\/em> (Maslach & Leiter, 1997) places burnout as the opposite of engagement.<\/p>\n

The book does well at creating a framework of sources and dimensions of burnout, from which a manager, worker, or consultant can use simply to combat against burnout; however, there are many nuances neglected. Firstly, the authors pose burnout in the person-in-environment model, yet individual personality and cognitive differences are hardly discussed in the book. The authors expanded on individual traits in a later paper, stating that burnout was more likely for those \u201cwho have a less hardy personality, who have a more external locus of control, and who score as [emotionally unstable] on the Five-Factor Model of personality\u201d (Maslach & Leiter, 2007). Multiple studies since have supported that those with more emotional intelligence fair better against burnout, including health professionals (Galdona, Urdaneta, Aldaz, & Etxeberria, 2012) and educators (Feroz & Parveen, 2012). There are several Dutch studies documenting cognitive performance in burnout patients over 1.5 (Oosterholt, Maes, Van der Linden, Verbraak, & Kompier, 2016) to 2 years\u00a0(van Dam, Keijsers, Eling, & Becker, 2012) showing that cognitive function post-burnout does not return to control levels, with out without clinical intervention. However, resilience to burnout as a function of general intelligence does not yet appear to be studied.<\/p>\n

Maslach and Leiter (1997) seem to generalize the corporate and industrial situation in which people experience burnout. They do little differentiate between labor-intensive jobs and desk jobs. One could question the validity of such a simplification; however, multiple studies support the notion that there is little variance in how blue-collar and white-collar workers experience burnout\u00a0(Toppinen-Tanner, Kalimo, & Mutanen, 2002), the only noticeable difference may be levels of cynicism and depersonalization\u00a0(Salanova, et al., 2005).<\/p>\n

Lastly, Maslach and Leiter (1997) portray engagement and burnout as opposing ends of a spectrum. Their perspective appears to have remained static over the years\u00a0(Maslach & Leiter, 2007) and is peer supported\u00a0(Gonzalez-Roma, Schaufeli, Bakker, & Lloret, 2006). Conversely, more recent studies have argued that \u201capathetic\u201d and \u201cengaged-exhausted\u201d groups defy this logic and that \u201cengagement might not be the purely desirable form of motivation as which it is sometimes portrayed\u00a0(Moeller, Ivcevic, White, Menges, & Brackett, 2018).<\/p>\n

In short, The Truth About Burnout (1997)<\/em> illustrates a useful framework, that has held up well overtime; yet, further research into the individual\u2019s roll in burnout is likely necessary to make the theory more comprehensive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Feroz, I., & Parveen, A. (2012, July 24). Emotional intelligence and burnout among high school teachers. International Journal of Psychology, 47<\/em>(Sup 1), pp. 293-340.<\/p>\n

Galdona, N., Urdaneta, E., Aldaz, E., & Etxeberria, I. (2012, November). EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND BURNOUT IN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS N. Galdona, E. Urdaneta,. Gerontologist<\/em>, pp. 485-485.<\/p>\n

Gonzalez-Roma, V., Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B., & Lloret, S. (2006). Burnout and work engagement: independent factors or opposite poles? Journal of Vocational Behavior, 68<\/em>(1), 165-174.<\/p>\n

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. (2007). Burnout. In Encyclopedia of Stress<\/em> (pp. 358-362). Amsterdam: Elsevier.<\/p>\n

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It.<\/em> San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.<\/p>\n

Moeller, J., Ivcevic, Z., White, A. E., Menges, J. I., & Brackett, M. A. (2018). Highly engaged but burned out: intra-individual profiles in the US workforce. Career Development International, 23<\/em>(1), 86-105.<\/p>\n

Oosterholt, B. G., Maes, J. H., Van der Linden, D., Verbraak, M. J., & Kompier, M. A. (2016). Getting better, but not well: A 1.5 year follow-up of cognitiveperformance and cortisol levels in clinical and non-Clinical burnout. Biological Psychology, 117<\/em>, 89-99.<\/p>\n

Salanova, M., Llorens, S., Garcia-Renedo, M., Burriel, R., Breso, E., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2005, October). TOWARDS A FOUR-DIMENSIONAL MODEL OF BURNOUT: A MULTIGROUP FACTOR-ANALYTIC STUDY INCLUDING DEPERSONALIZATION AND CYNICISM. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 65<\/em>(5), 807-819.<\/p>\n

Toppinen-Tanner, S., Kalimo, R., & Mutanen, P. (2002). The process of burnout in white-collar and blue-collar jobs: eight-year prospective study of exhaustion. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23<\/em>, 555-570.<\/p>\n

van Dam, A., Keijsers, G. P., Eling, P. A., & Becker, E. S. (2012, October-December). Impaired cognitive performance and responsiveness to reward in burnout patients: Two years later. Work & Stress, 26<\/em>(4), 333-346.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Burnout is defined by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter in The Truth About Burnout\u00a0(1997) as a \u201cgradual process of loss during which the mismatch between the needs of the person and the demands of the job grows ever greater\u201d and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2422],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ryanmccreedy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}