The Truth about Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do about It

Christina Maslach is well-known in psychology as the person who has championed the problem of burnout over more than two decades. For quite a time she was something of a lone voice. Burnout is a prolonged response to chronic physical, emotional and interpersonal stressors at work, leading to exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy. In a memorable term the authors describe it as erosion of the soul. Burnout has to be seen in the larger organizational context of people's relationship with their work: it's usually the job and the organization rather than the individual, although there are clearly differences in individuals' resilience to burnout. There are many symptoms of burnout, including trouble sleeping, constantly worrying, feeling unappreciated or "used" at work and feeling less effective or competent. Many people find that they easily becoming angry or irritated and altogether too many start drinking or abusing other substances. Burnout is immensly costly, not just for individuals, but also for organizations. I agree with another reviewer who lamented the paucity of data on just how costly burnout is to a company's bottom line. But judging by the number of corporations now asking epxerts to go in and help them deal with the burnout problem, I think that the message is getting through. This is an excellent overview of the problem nearly ten years ago. If anything, the situation is becoming worse, and Maslach, and now an expanding band of other psychologists has continued to do empirical research on the problem, and have been coming up with ever more sophisticated solutions. But even with the passage of time, this book remains highly recommended.

In the Truth About Burnout Drs. Maslach and Leiter propose the first real cure for burnout and the key to releasing peak potential in the workforce.Much of the past advice on the topic of burnout focuses on how to help people cope with burnout. These techniques are useful and come in handy, but unfortunately they do not position or fortify people to reach higher levels of performance. Simply treating the symptoms of burnout is like giving someone a medicine that provides temporary relief from external signs that they have a cold. After the medication wears off, they still have a virus raging through their body that's slowing them down. Likewise the "virus" that causes burnout is disengagement with work and no matter what temporary relief solution we provide to ease the pain, in the form of workshops on how to cope and "employee assistance programs" at the end of the day the "virus of disengagement" is still alive and well and impairing performance. This book is for anyone manager or individual contributor who has decided to stop coping and "sugar-coating" and instead seek a real and practical solution to burnout. I highly recommend it.Joe Santana,Co-author Manage IT

I currently teach a graduate-level course on Burnout in the Helping Professions. This book serves as the "bible" on burnout and prevention strategies from both organizational and personal perspectives. Use it fopr academic purposes as well as personal reasons. You'll be glad you did!

THE TRUTH ABOUT BURNOUT is that it is not an imperfection of the individual employee. Burn-out is a symptom of an organization in trouble.Christina Maslach is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and the creator of The Maslach Burnout Inventory. Michael P. Leiter is Dean of the Faculty at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada.The traditional perspective about burnout is that it is an individual problem. The natural solutions to this perspective focuses on providing courses on stress management, bringing in Employee Assistance Programs, and doing a better job of selecting in people who can handle stress.The authors argue that these interventions are positive but incomplete.If employee burnout really is a symptom of an organization in trouble, then the interventions need to be organizational in context. They begin by analyzing job-person fit from the following dimensions: workload, control, rewards, community, fairness, a! nd values. There is a case description of a 750 bed hospital which illustrates these concepts in practice.As it stands, the book makes its case well and provides concrete suggestions. The Maslach Burnout Inventory would appear to be an excellent tool for use in organization development interventions. The authors clearly have a solid grasp of their subject.The limitations of this book are that I don't think the authors provide a convincing case for CEOs to take employee burnout seriously.For CEOs to take employee burnout as seriously as Maslach and Leiter would like, we think there needs to be some recognition at the Board of Directors level that this is an important issue.In our work with Boards of Directors, we seldom see that recognition.Future editions of THE TRUTH ABOUT BURNOUT would benefit from more discussion about how burnout effects share holder value. Only five pages out of 178 focus on how burnout impacts the financial performance of a company.To ! get CEOs to take burnout seriously, the Compensation Commit! tee of Boards would have to add that a percentage of each CEO's bonus pay be determined by positive or negative deviation from some desired employee turn-over statistic or some desired customer satisfaction statistic. As it currently stands in North America, few companies even bother to collect employee turnover and customer satisfaction statistics. Few companies bother to collect the true costs of recruiting/training new employees. If it is not important enough for the Board of Directors to measure, then why should the CEO assume that it counts? That's a problem we would love to see Maslach and Leiter address.Fortunately for them, a model exists. When a Board is serious enough to count diversity as a component of a CEO's variable compensation, suddenly companies seem to take diversity seriously!And if the Board does not count it important enough to be part of the variable compensation system, then the company is apt to engage in more talk and training than! action.

Most books on burnout are based on the premise that burnout happens because of some "flaw" in the individual, so the solution is for the individual to change him/herself. This viewpoint masks the extent to which burnout has become endemic in American corporations, as well as in its more traditional venues, the "helping" professions. For 20 years, Maslach has been a voice in the wilderness, pointing out that the problem arises from the work environment and not the individual. Far from being "flawed," the people who burn out are those that a company can least afford to lose: the ones who take their jobs seriously. But the ugly little secret of American corporations is that burnout is cost-effective: employees who put up with impossible workloads, lack of control, a hostile and competitive work environment, no recognition, and no raises can keep a "downsized" company going; and if the employee burns out and quits, well, all the better for the bottom line ... Maslach and Leiter prove convincingly that the costs of burnout are non-trivial to the corporation as well: reduced productivity, loss of expertise, increased hiring and training requirements, employees who do the minimum rather than approaching their jobs with enthusiasm. And they point out that the cure for the problem lies in a concerted effort by employees and management to improve the work environment.The most useful part of the book, to my mind, are the sections that describe how workers and managers can burnout-proof the work situation. Some of the earlier chapters, on how burnout happens and what it consists of, became a little repetitious, but perhaps that's because I've seen enough burnout (in myself and in others) that much of this was "old hat" to me! From my own experience, I agree wholeheartedly with the authors' conclusions about the causes for burnout, and I hope that more managers read this book and take its recommendations seriously.