Job Burnout and Dysfunctional Work Attitude

Abstract

Over the past three decades, organizational researchers have shown that job burnout could result in a number of dysfunctional attitudes affecting individual employee well-being and organizational outcomes, including negative orientation towards clients (Cherniss, 1980), reduced job performance (Kahill, 1988), reduced organizational commitment (Kalliath, O’Driscoll and Gillespie, 1998; Leiter and Maslach, 1988), reduced job satisfaction (Maslach and Jackson, 1981), reduced quality of personal life (Kahill, 1988; Maslach and Jackson, 1981), depression (Jayaratne and Chess, 1983; Jayaratne, Chess and Kunkel, 1986), and guilt (Pines and Kafry, 1981). One common theme running through this stream of research is the effect of job burnout contributing to negative work attitudes. Given the mounting costs of job burnout to organizations and to individual employees (Golembiewski, Hilles and Rick, 1987; ILO, 1992; Pines and Maslach, 1978), the investigation of viable antidotes to job burnout out has become urgent. In the present chapter, I shall present evidence to support the converse hypotheses – that positive work attitudes can combat job burnout. I will show that there are direct and indirect effects of three commonly held work attitudes, namely job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and supervisor satisfaction on reduced levels of job burnout.