Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout
Lakshmi Ramarajan, Sigal G. Barsade
Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, November 2006
When Lakshmi Ramarajan worked for a non-profit organization several years ago, she noticed a high turnover rate among the employees. It wasn't because of the work itself, but because of the organization's management. Complaints about the negative work environment were met with inertia or rejected out of hand. Eventually a lot of employees left.
That experience led to a research paper co-authored by Ramarajan, now a doctoral student in the Wharton management department, and Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade titled, "What Makes the Job Tough? The Influence of Organizational Respect on Burnout in Human Services." While the researchers' paper focuses on the health care industry – specifically on certified nursing assistants (CNAs) in a large, long-term care facility – their findings apply to a broader range of industries and individuals.
In conducting their study – which looked at CNAs from 13 units across three sites of a long-term care facility during two different time periods, 2003 and 2005 – the researchers measured several aspects of participants' jobs. Under the heading "organizational respect," for example, participants were asked to rank how characteristic, or how uncharacteristic, the following five statements were of their organization: "Staff members respect each other;" "Staff members are treated with dignity;" "Cultural diversity of the staff is valued;" "Supervisors pay attention to staff members' ideas," and "Staff members are encouraged to be creative when solving problems." These were the characteristics that a committee of senior managers and employees thought best illustrated how organizational respect would be demonstrated in their organization.
Under the heading of "autonomy," participants were asked to respond to the following statements: "In general, how much say or influence do you feel you have in what goes on in your unit?" "Do you feel that you can influence decision-making ... regarding things about which you are concerned?" "Does your supervisor ask your opinion when a problem comes up which involves your work?"
Under the heading "trait negative affectivity," employees rated their general tendency to feel irritable, upset, nervous, afraid and guilty. "Burnout" was measured by participants' reactions to four statements: "I feel emotionally drained from my work;" "I feel used up at the end of the workday;" "I feel fatigued when I get up in the morning and have to face another day on the job," and "I feel burned out from my work."
The study revealed significant findings. Organizational respect influences burnout above and beyond the effects of job demands and negative affectivity. Because existing studies conceptualize burnout as stemming from the job or the individual, rather than the organization, the "problem" from a managerial perspective is the person, the authors note.
The impact of organizational respect on burnout is felt most strongly when job autonomy is low. This finding confirms the researchers' hypothesis going into the study about the importance of autonomy, which they define as "the discretion that one has to determine the processes and schedules involved in completing a task."
Putting work in a broader context, the authors' research has a number of implications for managers. While it is likely that disrespect is experienced across industries, disrespect for individuals may be particularly problematic in the helping professions where concern for individuals is supposedly paramount. Because it is not just the demands of the job, or the personality of the employee, that drive burnout in human services jobs, but is also the organizational environment, there is a point of entry for human resource management. Good versus poor management, in the form of organizational respect, may therefore have a clear and critical role in stemming burnout in human service organizations.
