Different Perspectives on Job Burnout

Burnout across thirteen cultures: Stress and coping in child and youth care workers.

By Victor Savicki

Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood, 229 pp., ISBN #0-275-97453-7. $67.95

Review by Christina Maslach

The relationship that people have with their work, and the difficulties that can arise when

that relationship goes awry, have been long recognized as a significant phenomenon of the

modern age. The use of the term "burnout" for this phenomenon began to appear with some

regularity in the 1970's in the United States, especially among people working in the human

services. This popular usage was presaged by Greene's 1961 novel, A Burnt Out Case, in which

a spiritually tormented and disillusioned architect quits his job and withdraws into the African

jungle. Even earlier writing, both fictional and non-fictional, described similar phenomena,

including extreme fatigue and the loss of idealism and passion for one's job.

The evocative power of the burnout term to capture the realities of people's experiences

in the workplace is what has made it both important and controversial in the research field. As

the "language of the people," burnout was more grounded in the complexities of people's

relationship to work, and gave new attention to some aspects of it. However, burnout was also

derided at first as non-scholarly "pop psychology." Unlike other research on the workplace,

which used a top-down approach derived from a scholarly theory, burnout research initially

utilized a bottom-up or "grass-roots" approach derived from people's workplace experiences. At

first, the popular, non-academic origins of burnout were more of a liability than an advantage.

However, given the subsequent development of theoretical models and numerous empirical

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studies, the issue of research scholarship has now been laid to rest. What has emerged from all

of this research is a conceptualization of job burnout as a psychological syndrome in response to

chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are an

overwhelming exhaustion; feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job; and a sense of

ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.

Research on burnout has gone through distinct phases of development. In the first phase,

the work was exploratory and had the goal of articulating just what burnout was. The initial

articles appeared in the mid-1970's in the United States, and their primary contribution was to

describe the basic phenomenon, give it the identifying name of "burnout," and show that it was

not an uncommon response. This early writing was based on the experience of people working in

human services and health care -- occupations in which the goal is to provide aid and service to

people in need, and which can therefore be characterized by emotional and interpersonal

stressors. Thus, burnout research had its roots in caregiving and service occupations, in which

the core of the job was the relationship between provider and recipient. This interpersonal

context focused attention on the individual's emotions, and on the motives and values underlying

his or her work with recipients.

The clinical and social psychological perspectives of the initial articles influenced the

nature of the first phase of burnout research. On the clinical side, the focus was on symptoms of

burnout and on issues of mental health. On the social side, the focus was on the relationship

between provider and recipient and on the situational context of service occupations. Most of

this initial research was descriptive and qualitative in nature, utilizing such techniques as

interviews, case studies, and on-site observations.

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 In the 1980's the work on burnout shifted to more systematic empirical research. This

work was more quantitative in nature, utilizing questionnaire and survey methodology, and

studying larger subject populations. A particular focus of this research was the assessment of

burnout, and standardized measures were developed. The shift to greater empiricism was

accompanied by theoretical and methodological contributions from the field of industrial-

organizational psychology. Burnout was viewed as a form of job stress, with links to such

concepts as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover. The industrial-

organizational approach, when combined with the prior work based in clinical and social

psychology, generated a richer diversity of perspectives on burnout and strengthened the

scholarly base via the use of standardized tools and research designs.

In the 1990's this empirical phase continued, but with several new directions. First, the

concept of burnout was extended to occupations beyond the human services. Second, burnout

research was enhanced by more sophisticated methodology and statistical tools. The complex

relationships among organizational factors and the three components of burnout led to the use of

structural models in much of burnout research. Third, longitudinal studies began to assess the

links between the work environment at one time and the individual's thoughts and feelings at a

later time. In addition to addressing the fundamental premise that burnout is a consequence of

the interaction of an individual with a work setting, longitudinal studies are important for

assessing the impact of interventions to alleviate burnout.

A fourth domain in which burnout research has expanded is that it has extended beyond

its original North American borders. At first, the phenomenon drew attention in English-

speaking countries, but soon articles, books, and research measures were translated into

numerous languages, and subsequently research on burnout emerged in many countries of

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Europe, as well as Israel. Now burnout research is becoming even more global, and is being

carried out in other areas of the world, including Asia and South America.

Some of this international research has involved cross-national comparisons. Some

studies have compared the burnout profiles of particular occupational groups across nations. For

example, Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998) compared the profiles of five occupational groups

(teaching, social services, medicine, mental health, and law enforcement) in the United States

and the Netherlands. Other researchers have collected burnout data from multiple countries

around the world (Golembiewski, Boudreau, Munzenrider, & Luo, 1996).

The book by Victor Savicki, “Burnout across Thirteen Cultures,” is a nice contribution to

this international literature on burnout. Like Schaufeli and his colleagues, Savicki has focused

on comparisons of a particular occupational group – in this case, child and youth care workers.

Like Golembiewski and his colleagues, Savicki has collected burnout data in a large number of

countries. But Savicki has introduced some cultural innovations into this cross-national research.

First, he has incorporated measures of the four cultural work values identified by Hofstede

(1980) -- individualism vs. collectivism, career success (masculinity) vs. quality of life

(femininity), power distance, and uncertainty avoidance – along with measures of work

environment and individual coping style. Moreover, he has included both individual and group

measures of these four dimensions. Second, he has gone beyond simple national comparisons to

look at other cultural variations. His research was carried out in ten countries (Australia, Austria,

Canada, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Poland, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom, and the

United States), but within three of them there were some explicit cultural comparisons. Canada

had both French-speaking and English-speaking samples, Germany had data from both the

former East and West sectors, and the United Kingdom contained samples from both England

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and Scotland. The focus on these within-nation comparisons, as well as between nations,

produces the “thirteen cultures” of the book title.

Savicki’s research is based on a convenience sample within each of these thirteen

cultures, which ranged in size from 37 to 98. All of the participants completed the same set of

scale measures, plus demographic information, and the results are presented in depth in data

summary tables and bar graphs. The combined data on the sample as a whole show a striking

relationship between levels of burnout and a combination of the work environment and coping

measures. This pattern is in accord with prior research on burnout, and suggests some

universality of the burnout phenomenon, since culture as a variable did not contribute additional

variance.

However, Savicki goes on to explore some intriguing differences between the different

cultural samples. For example, the West German sample scored highly on burnout and

individualism, while the East German sample scored highly on collectivism but had low scores

on burnout. The Canada-French and Canada-English samples did not differ on burnout, but

scored differently on three of the four cultural dimensions. Savicki also combines the samples

into larger groups for comparison, and comes up with some novel findings. European samples

from the former West Bloc showed a strong relationship between work environment and burnout,

but the former East Bloc samples did not. In another chapter, Savicki analyzes the differences

and similarities between the five English-speaking samples, and then compares them with the

other samples, finding that English speakers as a whole have more extreme scores on the burnout

scales and more intense reactions to work stressors. A nice touch in this section of the book is

that each chapter is introduced with some relevant historical background for the cultural

comparison that follows.

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 Although the findings are interesting ones, they need to be viewed with caution. Not

only are the samples relatively small in size, they vary considerably on demographic variables

and organizational factors. There are thus some significant confounding variables, but these are

not taken into account in the statistical analyses. Sometimes they are discussed in a more

qualitative way; for example, the finding that the English sample scored higher on collectivism

than the Scottish one is attributed to the fact that the English sample came from a mining region

that places a high value on small work groups. While informative, these unique differences make

clear that the samples can not be considered to be normative or representative of the larger

culture. However, the book tends to speak about the samples as though they were truly

normative, and the reader needs to keep in mind the limitations of the data base.

This book has some very ambitious goals. It presents separate chapters that analyze the

occupation of child and youth care workers, then burnout, and then culture – and it then tries to

integrate all of these pieces. It attempts to speak to several audiences – those who are familiar

with research methodology and data analysis, and those who are not. After presentation of the

data, the book seems to change course and tackle additional issues that do not connect clearly

with the prior research. One chapter summarizes approaches to prevention and remediation of

burnout, and the last chapter points to other topics (such as emotionality as a job skill). In some

sense, Savicki is trying to do it all in his book, and he covers a remarkable range of material. But

as a reader, I found myself wishing for a clearer focus on fewer issues in more depth.

Nevertheless, this book is a valuable one for its creative perspective on the relationship of culture

to the burnout phenomenon. Savicki’s accomplishments are to be applauded, and they should

inspire future researchers to pursue further exploration of this complex and challenging field.

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References:

Golembiewski, R. T., Boudreau, R. A., Munzenrider, R. F., & Luo, H. (1996). Global

burnout: A worldwide pandemic explored by the phase model. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Schaufeli, W., & Enzmann, D. (1998). The burnout companion to study and practice: A

critical analysis. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor & Francis.