Are you experiencing this feeling in your career?
Researchers Pines and Aronson found the most common response to burnout among dentists was to take on more patients! In doing this they were saying this job has become boring and I’m not getting any appreciation so I might as well become wealthy and retire early!
Fredric Herzberg an American psychologist who was an influential name in business management would have advised the dentists that they were following the wrong pathway in pursuing wealth to solve their problems.
He would have argued that his Motivation-Hygiene theory, was the course to follow. The positive or ‘hygiene’ factors for dentists would have been achievement, recognition, dentistry itself, responsibility, advancement, and growth being more important than salary.
Frederick Irving Herzberg (April 18, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management. He is most famous for introducing job enrichment and the Motivator-Hygiene theory.
No recognition for professional achievement
What we can see here is the problem the dentists faced, no recognition for their professional achievement or their skill, the level of responsibility they faced as surgeons, and approval from their clients regarding their professionalism.
Pines and Aronson found in their work with dentists (and other professionals) that while money is a very useful commodity (and may buy some happiness), it is not the cure for burnout. They believed the best way for dentists to cope with burnout was to see fewer patients and spend more time with them.
This time would be spent putting them at ease, reducing their anxiety and allowing patients and dentists to emerge as three-dimensional people for each other. The researchers also found that patients began looking at dentists as competent and caring people. This enabled patients to show the dentist some honest appreciation which was one of the things they were lacking.
It was recommended that dentists meet with one another on a regular basis to share ideas, talk about problems in the profession, and discuss new technology and methods. This strategy to provide them with the kind of support and appreciation that many people in isolated professions could get from their co-workers.
In the corporate world the men and women who “make it” are invariably people for whom work is the most important thing in their lives. This is what gives their life a sense of meaning and they identify with their organisation to such an extent that every success and failure are personalised. Every sacrifice they (or their family) make seems worth it if it will benefit the organisation and bring with it the desperately desired success.
These corporate executives with their involvement, commitment, and hard work, rewarded by continuous success, can continue to receive a sense of meaning from their work indefinitely. They burnout when for some reason it’s impossible to succeed. When inadequate authority or inadequate resources make it impossible for them to accomplish their work goals the way they think they should be accomplished, the frustration erodes the spirit, and they burnout.
Lack of authority, budget restrictions, time, and lack of human resources to perform up to their high expectations, can produce extreme stress for these corporate executives. Because these executives identify so much with their work, they see the organisations failure as their own. They are not only disappointed in themselves and in the organisation, they feel as if life itself has lost its meaning.
Coping with Burnout
Coping with burnout can (and should) happen on three levels: the level of the individual, the work team, and the organisation.
People experience life differently, and these differences affect their likelihood of burnout. Some people are continually anxious, and the world is a difficult place to live while others calmly go about their day to day activities maintaining that everything will be OK given time.
An individual who identifies too much with his work, sees in competition a threat, and responds to it with, anxiety, hostility and aggression may be called a type ‘A’ personality. Hostility being the defining core of their personality these people usually suffer negative health outcomes and its relationship to burnout.
Type ‘A’s don’t easily admit – even to themselves – the existence of any defect or stigma attached to their behaviour.
To help Type A’s find a sense of significance other than their high expectations for self-actualisation and success two cardiologists Friedman and Rosenman, developed some relevant strategies to help burnout sufferers. They believed that this this type ‘A’ personality gave people a greater chance of developing coronary heart disease.
Some of these strategies were:
- Submit your basic capacities and qualities to a rigorous self- appraisal.
- Try to retrieve your total personality by developing interest in the broader satisfactions of life.
- Establish life goals for your work and for your private life. These goals should give purpose and meaning to your life.
- Don’t devote as much attention and energy to trifling tasks as to truly major problems.
- Let your means justify your end.
- Accept the fact that that your life must be structured upon and maintained by uncompleted processes, tasks, and events.
Variety is the spice of life
Curiosity, involvement, and variety promote tendencies in a person that prevent burnout. They go a long way in reminding people that there are other things in life other than work to give them pleasure and restore a sense of meaning.
For the individual who feels they are suffering stress and is feeling burned out, one strategy to assist in coping with this condition is to keep a daily log of stresses. This is the first step in coming to terms and reducing burnout.
The log commences with a list of things that make you feel good and any stress or joy can be evaluated on the following scale. (Make the things that make you feel good first)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
not intense moderately intense extremely intense
Each stress should be described in terms of the coping effort it generated.
If the stress was a nasty comment by your boss or supervisor, what was your response? Did you confront them actively and directly and tell them how the comment made you feel (direct-active strategy) or did you avoid them for the rest of the day (direct- inactive tactic).
Did you call up your best friend and cry on their shoulder (indirect-active retreat). Or did you sneak out of work an go to the pub (indirect- inactive destructive) For each one of these responses you can indicate how successful it was, from 1 (not at all) to 7 (extremely).
At the end of the week or month you can go over your log and try and identify patterns in your stresses and in your attempts to master them.
Note: If you are being bullied keep a log of the occurrences and where possible get a witness to support these occurrences.
If you are asked to perform duties that are not in your job description or tasks that are impossible to fulfill, log these as a record for future defense of your position with superiors. Once again have a witness of these occurrences.
Most people find their stress is generated primarily at work, others by their home life, still overs by certain people or activities.
Most people find that by logging work activity they can find effective coping strategies by discussing workplace change with their supervisor or boss.
Most people find they use a limited vocabulary of coping strategy and they should try to broaden their response repertory.
The stresses that are likely to be the hardest to cope with are those generated by frustrated hopes. All of us remember why we chose our line of work; periodically we should explore to what extent our original hopes and expectations are being fulfilled. Burnout is usually associated with lost awareness of hopes and ambitions.
It is very important to continually reappraise your short and long-term goals. Write them down and every two or three months add a few notes to indicate how you have been progressing towards them.
These goals and hopes must be realistic for yourself and with those with whom you deal. Focusing on re-evaluation and reassessment enables consideration of what changes you want to make for the rest of your life. Consideration must be given to the amount of power and the number of options you have in making these changes.
Some changes may be extraordinarily difficult to make; others may be easier than you think.
Professor Ayala Pines is on the faculty of the School of Management at Ben Gurion University in Israel. She is a clinical psychologist specializing in work with couples in both Israel and California. Elliot Aronson was an American psychologist who carried out experiments on the theory of cognitive dissonance, and invented the Jigsaw Classroom, a cooperative teaching technique which facilitates learning while reducing interethnic hostility and prejudice.
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