Essay On Burnout

Burnout at the workplace

Definition

As stated by (Cordes & Dougherty, 1993) burnout is a stage of stress that a worker undergoes due to stressful conditions of work which may include workload, pressure from top manangement and the inability to cope with tasks or responsibilites assigned to workers. Burnout is not an issue of immediate result but takes a long period of time to become chronic or severe which results in loss of energy, inability to undertake responsibility leading to less work commitment and reduced productivity and quality of work is low (Maslach & Leiter, 1997).

Burnout affecting work performance

There are normally 3 phases of burnout which are emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and decrease in personal work satisfaction(Maslach, Schaufeli & Leiter, 2001). Emotional exhaustion includes emotional depletion, tiredness and the inabilty to continue with a work(Cordes& Dougherty, 1993; Maslach et al., 2001; Schutte, Toppinen,Kalimo & Schaufeli, 2000). At the satge of emotional exhaustion workers are less involved in work which consequently leads to burnout also called stress. After this phase comes depersonalization takes over the worker which is considered to be a defence mechanism which stops a person to undergo severe emotional and psychological bursting but unfortunately since the worker is no more productive , the organization suffers from economic loss since turnover is lower as quality of work is not up to expectations of clients. Moreover in the depersonalization state, a worker becomes less interactive to the surrounding and people.(Maslach et al., 2001; Singh, 2000 Singh & Goolsby, 1994). After depersonalization state, a worker tends to ask psychological questions such as evaluating his past ac...

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... enforce performance through disciplinary processes which is seen as a threatening situation as it affects the remuneration of the worker. If such statistics are used in a punitive way as the job demands it can be viewed by the worker in a negative perception but it can also help to upgrade the skills of a worker and improve the performance of the worker since feedback obtained from the surveillance helps and organization to well train and improve the well being of the workers(Holman,

2004; Taylor & Bain, 1999). Unfortunately long term monitoring leads to stress (Holdsworth & Cartwright, 2002; Wallace et al., 2000)

It leads employees to be in a state of depression and develop anxiety . Employee monitoing is associated with emotional exhaustion which then affects their performance in an organization especially those employees who hates being observed (Holman, 2004).