Emotional exhaustion
Encyclopedia
Emotional exhaustion is a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion that results from excessive job demands and continuous stress
. 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".
. This model suggests burnout consists of three interrelated parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment. Depersonalization
, also called "dehumanization
", refers to a set of callous and insensitive behaviors displayed by a worker toward a client. Diminished personal accomplishment refers to negative evaluations of the self
.
, emotional culture
, and supervisory regulation of display rules.
According to the Conservation of Resources theory (COR), people strive to obtain, retain and protect their personal resources, either instrumental (e.g., money or shelter), social
(e.g., social support or status) or psychological (e.g., 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.
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
.
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
.
Another field study, basing on a sample
of a 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;), and receive social support from their supervisors, are less likely to experience emotional exhaustion.
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).
s, and vary in their expectations for regulating and expressing emotions in the workplace. Such differences are part of the emotional culture of those cultures. For example, 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.
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 feeling
s, ("the service with a smile" norm); Whereas, France
can be used as an example of a country with a more impulsive
-orientation toward emotions.
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.
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.).
Recent study also suggests that employees who hold the same job (e.g., 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
) .
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.
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 behavior
s (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.
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).
Stress (biology)
Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...
. It describes a feeling of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one's work. It is manifested by both physical fatigue
Fatigue (material)
'In materials science, fatigue is the progressive and localized structural damage that occurs when a material is subjected to cyclic loading. The nominal maximum stress values are less than the ultimate tensile stress limit, and may be below the yield stress limit of the material.Fatigue occurs...
and a sense of feeling psychologically and emotionally "drained".
Burnout
Most emotional exhaustion research has been guided by Maslach's and Jackson's three-component conceptualization of burnoutBurnout (psychology)
Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest. Research indicates general practitioners have the highest proportion of burnout cases; according to a recent Dutch study in Psychological Reports, no less than 40% of these experienced high levels of...
. This model suggests burnout consists of three interrelated parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment. Depersonalization
Depersonalization
Depersonalization is an anomaly of the mechanism by which an individual has self-awareness. It is a feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation. Sufferers feel they have changed, and the world has become less real, vague, dreamlike, or lacking in significance...
, also called "dehumanization
Dehumanization
Dehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...
", refers to a set of callous and insensitive behaviors displayed by a worker toward a client. Diminished personal accomplishment refers to negative evaluations of the self
Self (psychology)
The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the...
.
Determinants
The level of emotional exhaustion which is experienced by an employee is influenced by a variety of determinants, such as: personal resources, coping strategiesCoping Strategies
Coping Strategies is treatment designed for posttraumatic stress disorder within United States Armed Forces personnel and their families by the charitable organization Patriot Outreach...
, emotional culture
Emotions and culture
Emotions are universal phenomena; however, they are affected by culture. While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are...
, and supervisory regulation of display rules.
Personal resources
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 (e.g., money or shelter), social
Social
The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
(e.g., social support or status) or psychological (e.g., 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.
In a field study, those experiencing higher levels of job autonomy
Autonomy
Autonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...
(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
.
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
.
Another field study, basing on a sample
Sample (statistics)
In statistics, a sample is a subset of a population. Typically, the population is very large, making a census or a complete enumeration of all the values in the population impractical or impossible. The sample represents a subset of manageable size...
of a 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
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology, roughly corresponding to a person's belief in their own competence.It has been defined as the belief that one is capable of performing in a certain manner to attain certain set of goals. It is believed that our personalized ideas of self-efficacy affect...
(the belief in one's ability to succeed;), and receive social support from their supervisors, are less likely to experience emotional exhaustion.
Coping strategies
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
Avoidance coping
Avoidance coping, or escape coping, is a kind of generally maladaptive coping, characterized by the effort to escape from having to deal with a stressor.Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms are thought to be the precursor to avoidance coping...
and resignation
Resignation
A resignation is the formal act of giving up or quitting one's office or position. It can also refer to the act of admitting defeat in a game like chess, indicated by the resigning player declaring "I resign", turning his king on its side, extending his hand, or stopping the chess clock...
with the problematic situation).
Emotional culture
Regional and national cultures have been shown to have different norms for emotional expressionEmotional expression
In psychology, emotional expression is observable verbal and nonverbal behaviour that communicates emotion. Emotional expression can occur with or without self-awareness...
s, and vary in their expectations for regulating and expressing emotions in the workplace. Such differences are part of the emotional culture of those cultures. For example, 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.
An example of a culture with a strong institutional-orientation toward emotions is the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, due to the strong American norm to act positively and hide negative feeling
Feeling
Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...
s, ("the service with a smile" norm); Whereas, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
can be used as an example of a country with a more impulsive
Impulsivity
Impulsivity is a personality trait characterized by the inclination of an individual to initiate behavior without adequate forethought as to the consequences of their actions, acting on the spur of the moment. Eysenck and Eysenck related impulsivity to risk-taking, lack of planning, and making up...
-orientation toward emotions.
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.
On the basis of those arguments, an organizational research
Research
Research can be defined as the scientific search for knowledge, or as any systematic investigation, to establish novel facts, solve new or existing problems, prove new ideas, or develop new theories, usually using a scientific method...
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
Emotional labor
Emotional labor is a form of emotional regulation wherein workers are expected to display certain emotions as part of their job, and to promote organizational goals...
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.).
Supervisory regulation of "display rules"
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 that display rules.Recent study also suggests that employees who hold the same job (e.g., 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
Career
Career is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a person's "course or progress through life ". It is usually considered to pertain to remunerative work ....
identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
) .
Social interaction model of effects on work strain
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- Research indicates that emotion regulation is sometimes positively, sometimes negatively and sometimes not associated with strain. The intraindividual models do not predict when strain increases or decreases.
- The existing models do not distinguish between amplification and suppression of emotion, even though results tend to differ for them.
- These models do not refer to the social or interpersonal functions of emotions.
- They also do not explain the different effects that different discrete emotions have on strain (e.g. pleasant vs. unpleasant).
Cote (2005) suggests a social interaction model that takes into account these limitations. In this model, work strain is predicted according to:
- The type and authenticity of the emotion expressed by a sender in an interpersonal situation.
- Receiver's skill of decoding emotion display.
- Sender's response to receiver's reaction.
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.
Implications
Researches have linked emotional exhaustion to a plethora of ailments, and a general breakdown in feelings of community. 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
Organizational commitment
Organizational commitment in the fields of Organizational Behavior and Industrial/Organizational Psychology is, in a general sense, the employee's psychological attachment to the organization...
, lower job performance, less organizational citizenship behavior
Organizational citizenship behavior
Organizational Citizenship Behavior has been studied since the late 1970s. Over the past three decades, interest in these behaviors has increased substantially...
s (OCB) directed toward the organization (OCBO) and their supervisors (OCBS), and higher turnover
Turnover (employment)
In a human resources context, turnover or staff turnover or labour turnover is the rate at which an employer gains and loses employees. Simple ways to describe it are "how long employees tend to stay" or "the rate of traffic through the revolving door." Turnover is measured for individual companies...
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.
Similarly, longitudinal studies
Longitudinal study
A longitudinal study is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time — often many decades. It is a type of observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the...
found that exhausted employees show not only lower job performance, but also more absences, and greater likelihood of seeking employment
Employment
Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. An employee may be defined as:- Employee :...
elsewhere (actual voluntary turnover).
See also
- Organizational justiceOrganizational justiceThe term organizational justice was coined by Greenberg and is defined as an individual’s perception of and reactions to fairness in an organization. Justice or fairness refers to the idea that an action or decision is morally right, which may be defined according to ethics, religion, fairness,...
- Perceived organizational supportPerceived organizational supportPerceived Organizational Support is the degree to which employees believe that their organization values their contributions and cares about their well-being ....
- Perceived psychological contract violationPerceived psychological contract violationPerceived psychological contract violation is a construct that regards employees’ feelings of disappointment arising from their belief that their organization has broken its work-related promises , and is generally thought to be the organization’s contribution to a negative reciprocity dynamic,...
External links
- http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/fb05/psychologie/Abteil/ABO/forschung/emoarbeit_e.htm