William Atkins
Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:16
Science -
Health
Page 1 of 3
Whether an employee burns out and becomes depressed or is engaged and enthusiastic about his or her job is determined to a large degree by whether the employee feels the employer is treating him/her fairly or not.
American psychologist
Christina Maslach, from the University of California at Berkeley, and Canadian psychologist
Michael P. Leiter, from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, evaluated 992 employees at a large but “troubled” North American university who were going through major changes to their jobs.
Specifically, the university was being downsized and the employees were afraid of losing their jobs or of being switched to jobs they would not like. They had feelings of emotional exhaustion, which is a defined as a chronic state of physical, physchological, and emotional depletion due to excessive job demands, continuous problems, and other such troubles at work.
The research study by Maslach and Leiter, both noted experts in organizational psychology, wanted to discover which major factors explain why some employees are able to deal with major problems at work (successfully make whatever changes are necessary and remain positive and “engaged”) while other employees are not able to deal with such hardships (fail to make these changes and, instead, become cynics and “burnout”).
They wrote a paper “
Early predictors of job burnout and engagement” based on their study. It appears in the July 2008 issue of the
Journal of Applied Psychology (pages 498-512).
The abstract to their study states,
“A longitudinal study predicted changes in burnout or engagement a year later by identifying 2 types of early indicators at the initial assessment. Organizational employees (N = 466) completed measures of burnout and 6 areas of worklife at 2 times with a 1-year interval.”
It went on to say,
“Those people who showed an inconsistent pattern at Time 1 were more likely to change over the year than were those who did not. Among this group, those who also displayed a workplace incongruity in the area of fairness moved to burnout at Time 2, while those without this incongruity moved toward engagement. The implications of these 2 predictive indicators are discussed in terms of the enhanced ability to customize interventions for targeted groups within the workplace.”
Being overworked and underpaid are two factors in being "negative" at work--but, not the primary factor, according to these two researchers. Please read on.
