Tom Cox, George Kuk & Michael Leiter, “Burnout, Health, Work Stress and Organizational Healthiness”

This chapter explores burnout and work stress. Burnout is “an emotionally depleted state experiences by people in the helping professions” (178). Burnout is highly rooted in social context and determination. On the other hand, work stress focuses on the “interaction between the person and the environment”(179). Work stress exists in relation to the processes that underly people’s interactions with their work environment and their attempts to cope with that environment (Cox, 1990).

Burnout has been notably linked to work overload, routine nature of work, and interpersonal conflict through work. It is often associated with clusters of emotions that involve exhaustion, depersonalization and emotional detachment, and reduced personal accomplishment, helplessness, and low self-esteem.

“Both feelings of emotional exhaustion (burnout) and feelings of being worn out (well-being) have been variously linked to the experience of work stress, both as contributing facts to that experience and as possible outcomes (Cox, 1990)” (185). Some theorists have suggested that organizational stressors (demands) impact the level of emotional exhaustion individuals feel, especially in the face of little social support and skill utilization.

Although work stress and burnout have little impact on each other, they both arise by nature of insufficient organizational environments.

Tom Cox, George Kuk & Michael Leiter, “Burnout, Health, Work Stress and Organizational Healthiness” in Wilmar B Schaufeli, Christina Maslach & Tadeusz Marek, eds Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research (USA: Taylor & Francis, 1993) 177.