Emotional exhaustion is symptom of burnout, [1] a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that results from excessive work or personal demands, or continuous stress. [2] It describes a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. It is manifested by both physical fatigue and a sense of feeling psychologically and emotionally "drained". [3]
There are various ways in which burnout can occur such as: impacting an individual's physical, emotional, and behavioral aspects. [4] Emotional exhaustion research has been guided by Christina Maslach's and Susan E. Jackson's three-component conceptualization of burnout. Which results from ongoing stress and poor stress management, has been defined as “a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a sense of low personal accomplishment that leads to decreased effectiveness at work” by the National Library of Medicine. [5] This model suggests burnout consists of three interrelated parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment. Diminished personal accomplishment refers to negative evaluations of the self. [6] [7] [8]
Some new perspectives on how to prevent burnout, also suggested by Christina Maslach, include two approaches. These two go about burnout differently in how they do not directly address stress, but rather the situation. The first approach includes recognizing how the relationship between person and situation are interacting. There may be some adjusting required to decrease the likelihood of burnout. Second, this approach takes burnout from a different standpoint and causes the person to evaluate their control over their situation. If the person has a better sense of their current situation and their ability to make decisions, they are less likely to get burned out. [9]
The level of emotional exhaustion which is experienced by an employee is influenced by a variety of determinants, such as: personal resources, coping strategies, emotional culture, and supervisory regulation of display rules.
Personal resources, such as status, social support, money, or shelter, may reduce or prevent an employee's emotional exhaustion.
According to the Conservation of Resources theory (COR), people strive to obtain, retain and protect their personal resources, either instrumental (for example, money or shelter), social (such as social support or status), or psychological (for example, self-esteem or sense of autonomy). The COR's theory suggest that people must invest resources in order to protect against resource loss, recover from losses, and regain resources. Therefore, those with greater resources are less vulnerable to resource loss and more capable of orchestrating resource gain, whereas, for those with fewer resources, ongoing resource loss may result in a rapid influential loss spiral. [10] [11] [12] [13]
In a field study, those experiencing higher levels of job autonomy (the freedom to take initiative and exercise discretion in decision-making), low task complexity, supervisory support, and the internal locus of control (a tendency to attribute events to one's own control; such as the tendency to attribute a success to internal causes, like one's ability or effort, rather than external causes, such as good luck), tend to experience lower degrees of emotional exhaustion. [14]
Similarly, researchers reveal that even though higher degree of using emotion regulation on the job is related to higher levels of employees' emotional exhaustion, when employees believe that they have autonomy in their job behaviors, emotion regulation, that is otherwise exhausting, is not associated with exhaustion at all. [15]
Another field study, basing on a sample of call center workers in a large telecommunications corporation, indicate that employees who are highly identified with the service work, possess higher levels of self-efficacy (the belief in one's ability to succeed; [16] ), and receive social support from their supervisors, are less likely to experience emotional exhaustion. [17]
In a study done with college students, burnout resulted from a lifestyle that required extremely high amounts of effort with low support systems in place to aid with stress coping. The personal resource of support mechanisms (such as social support) was determined to be a huge benefit that reduced the negative effects of stress that can lead to burnout. [18]
Researchers suggest that emotional exhaustion may be a result of using inadequate strategies in order to cope with problematic events on the job. Accordingly, there are empirical evidences that employees who tend to use more control strategies, which are considered more productive strategies (concerned with addressing the situation; such as direct action and help seeking) tend to experience lower levels of emotional exhaustion than do those who tend to use more escape strategies, which are considered inadequate strategies (used to avoid problems; such as avoidance and resignation with the problematic situation). [14] Coping strategies can be used with a problem-focused perspective (previously called control strategies) or an avoidant/emotion-focused perspective (previously called escape strategies). Empirical research has found that exercising self-awareness, as a problem-focused strategy, and spending time with family, as an emotion-focused strategy, were the most used coping strategies. [19]
Regional and national cultures have been shown to have different norms for emotional expressions, [20] and vary in their expectations for regulating and expressing emotions in the workplace. [21] Such differences are part of the emotional culture of those cultures. Some cultures are more institutionally-oriented, with strong norms about regulating emotions to fulfill institutional roles and standards, whereas other cultures are more impulsively-oriented that value expressing unregulated emotions. [22]
An example of a culture with a strong institutional-orientation toward emotions is the United States, due to the strong American norm to act positively and hide negative feelings ("the service with a smile" norm); [23] whereas France can be used as an example of a country with a more impulsive-orientation toward emotions. [24]
People within cultures that tend to use an impulsive orientation to understand and evaluate social situations are likely to feel more personal control over their expressions than people within institutional-oriented cultures, resulting in more of a buffer against strain and emotional exhaustion. [22]
On the basis of those arguments, an organizational research investigated the influence of emotional culture on the degree of emotional exhaustion experienced by employees who work on jobs that include interaction with clients and emotional labor demands. In this study, among employees working at such jobs, those who belonged to more impulsive-oriented culture (France) showed lower degrees of emotional exhaustion, than those who belonged to more institutional-oriented culture (U.S.). [15]
Supervisors are likely to be important definers of interpersonal demands at the job level, given their direct influence on worker's beliefs about high-performance expectations. Moreover, supervisors' impressions of the importance of display rules (the rules about what kind of emotions are allowed to be expressed on the job) influence the employees' impressions of these display rules. [25] [26]
A recent study also suggests that employees who hold the same job (for example, call-center representatives) may experience the same "display rules" differently if they work for different supervisors, who vary in the emphasis they place on their subordinates' interpersonal role requirements, and by so, experience different levels of emotional exhaustion. Such that having a supervisor who places greater importance on interpersonal job demands results in greater emotional exhaustion (especially for those subordinates who have low career identity) . [17]
Current models of how emotion regulation impacts strain focus on intraindividual processes that operate within the mind and body of the person regulating the emotion, but these models have several limitations. [27]
Cote (2005) suggests a social interaction model that takes into account these limitations. In this model, work strain is predicted according to:
According to Cote (2005), interpersonal feedback is far more potent than intraindividual feedback, and dominates if the two processes are in opposition. The social interaction model suggests an alternate route by which to proceed with theory building and future research.
Researches have linked emotional exhaustion to a plethora of ailments, and a general breakdown in feelings of community. [8] However, a growing body of research has begun to demonstrate that emotional exhaustion can have deleterious consequences for organizations as well.
For example, Russell Cropanzano and his colleagues, in their two field studies, indicate that exhausted employees show lower organizational commitment, lower job performance, less organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) directed toward the organization (OCBO) and their supervisors (OCBS), and higher turnover intentions. They suggest that emotional exhaustion can be seen as a cost that qualifies the value of any benefits received through employment, and so that an organization, which overworks its employees to the point of emotional exhaustion, may be seen as unfair. [30]
Similarly, longitudinal studies found that exhausted employees show not only lower job performance, but also more absences, and greater likelihood of seeking employment elsewhere (actual voluntary turnover). [2] [31]
Ergophobia is described as an extreme and debilitating fear associated with work, a fear of finding or losing employment, or fear of specific tasks in the workplace. The term ergophobia comes from the Greek "ergon" (work) and "phobos" (fear).
Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers. This includes analysis and decision-making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed. This is done so as to produce a certain feeling in the customer or client that will allow the company or organization to succeed.
Affective events theory (AET) is an industrial and organizational psychology model developed by organizational psychologists Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano to explain how emotions and moods influence job performance and job satisfaction. The model explains the linkages between employees' internal influences and their reactions to incidents that occur in their work environment that affect their performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. The theory proposes that affective work behaviors are explained by employee mood and emotions, while cognitive-based behaviors are the best predictors of job satisfaction. The theory proposes that positive-inducing as well as negative-inducing emotional incidents at work are distinguishable and have a significant psychological impact upon workers' job satisfaction. This results in lasting internal and external affective reactions exhibited through job performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.
Greenberg (1987) introduced the concept of organizational justice with regard to how an employee judges the behavior of the organization and the employee's resulting attitude and behaviour. For example, if a firm makes redundant half of the workers, an employee may feel a sense of injustice with a resulting change in attitude and a drop in productivity.
Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long working hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.
Positive affectivity (PA) is a human characteristic that describes how much people experience positive affects ; and as a consequence how they interact with others and with their surroundings.
Work engagement is the "harnessing of organization member's selves to their work roles: in engagement, people employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, emotionally and mentally during role performances". Three aspects of work motivation are cognitive, emotional and physical engagement.
The ICD-11 of the World Health Organization (WHO) describes occupational burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed, with symptoms characterized by "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy." It is classified as a mismatch between the challenges of work and a person's mental and physical resources, but is not recognized as a standalone medical condition, apart from the diagnosis of exhaustion disorder, which is only used in Sweden.
Occupational stress is psychological stress related to one's job. Occupational stress refers to a chronic condition. Occupational stress can be managed by understanding what the stressful conditions at work are and taking steps to remediate those conditions. Occupational stress can occur when workers do not feel supported by supervisors or coworkers, feel as if they have little control over the work they perform, or find that their efforts on the job are incommensurate with the job's rewards. Occupational stress is a concern for both employees and employers because stressful job conditions are related to employees' emotional well-being, physical health, and job performance. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization conducted a study. The results showed that exposure to long working hours, operates through increased psycho-social occupational stress. It is the occupational risk factor with the largest attributable burden of disease, according to these official estimates causing an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke events in 2016.
Emotions in the workplace play a large role in how an entire organization communicates within itself and to the outside world. "Events at work have real emotional impact on participants. The consequences of emotional states in the workplace, both behaviors and attitudes, have substantial significance for individuals, groups, and society". "Positive emotions in the workplace help employees obtain favorable outcomes including achievement, job enrichment and higher quality social context". "Negative emotions, such as fear, anger, stress, hostility, sadness, and guilt, however increase the predictability of workplace deviance,", and how the outside world views the organization.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory(MBI) is a psychological assessment instrument comprising 22 symptom items pertaining to occupational burnout. The original form of the MBI was developed by Christina Maslach and Susan E. Jackson with the goal of assessing an individual's experience of burnout. As underlined by Schaufeli (2003), a major figure of burnout research, "the MBI is neither grounded in firm clinical observation nor based on sound theorising. Instead, it has been developed inductively by factor-analysing a rather arbitrary set of items" (p. 3). The instrument takes 10 minutes to complete. The MBI measures three dimensions of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment.
Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people and organizations outside it, including employers, other employees, suppliers, clients, patients and citizens. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction (the relationship between a person's psychological and physical capacities and the demands placed on those capacities by the person's social and physical environment.) can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work with CWB.
The job demands-resources model is an occupational stress model that suggests strain is a response to imbalance between demands on the individual and the resources he or she has to deal with those demands. The JD-R was introduced as an alternative to other models of employee well-being, such as the demand-control model and the effort-reward imbalance model.
Social undermining is the expression of negative emotions directed towards a particular person or negative evaluations of the person as a way to prevent the person from achieving their goals.
Workplace incivility has been defined as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target. Uncivil behaviors are characteristically rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others. The authors hypothesize there is an "incivility spiral" in the workplace made worse by "asymmetric global interaction".
Positive psychology is defined as a method of building on what is good and what is already working instead of attempting to stimulate improvement by focusing on the weak links in an individual, a group, or in this case, a company. Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is more enjoyable, productive, and values individual employees. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory is a stress theory that describes the motivation that drives humans to both maintain their current resources and to pursue new resources. This theory was proposed by Dr. Stevan E. Hobfoll in 1989 as a way to expand on the literature of stress as a construct.
Russell Cropanzano is an American management scholar. As of 2022, he is a professor of organizational behavior at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder.
Psychosocial safety climate (PSC) is a term used in organisational psychology that refers to the shared belief held by workers that their psychological health and safety is protected and supported by senior management. PSC builds on other work stress theories and concerns the corporate climate for worker psychological health and safety. Studies have found that a favourable PSC is associated with low rates of absenteeism and high productivity, while a poor climate is linked to high levels of workplace stress and job dissatisfaction. PSC can be promoted by organisational practices, policies and procedures that prioritise the psychosocial safety and wellbeing of workers. The theory has implications for the design of workplaces for the best possible outcomes for both workers and management.
