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Early in my career I worked at a place that was the textbook example of Corporate Hell on Earth. My manager had a habit of lashing out in meetings if you disagreed with him. Public email floggings were common; once, a woman in another department made a vital (read: politically charged) error and my manager sent her a flaming missive, copying all of the senior executives in her department. I don't recall seeing her much after that.
It took a while before I understood that my manager wasn't the source of the toxicity problem, he was pressured and encouraged by the layer of management above him.
With this experience permanently etched in my mind I read with appreciation a recent study, summarized in Knowledge@Wharton entitled, "What Makes the Job Tough? The Influence of Organizational Respect on Burnout in Human Services," written by Wharton doctoral student Lakshmi Ramarajan and Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade, so interesting. The report provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of the origins of burnout that I'd ever read.
I've found it difficult to identify with the typical profiles offered up in the reams of articles written about employee burnout--even when I was officially fried. But this study offered up much more complexity.
According to Barsade,
"One of the biggest complaints employees have is they are not sufficiently recognized by their organizations for the work that they do. Respect is a component of recognition. When employees don't feel that the organization respects and values them, they tend to experience higher levels of burnout."
Or, as Ramarajan puts it, "it is often not the job that burns you out, but the organization."
My exit interview from Hell yielded few surprises. When asked why I was leaving the company I cited "preserving my sanity" as a primary reason. What occurred to me, over time and much contemplation and research, was that I was becoming complicit in the burnout behavior. Initially I had been shocked by the disrespect at the office, but over time I came to expect it, and then I began to blame myself for it. It took some caring friends to remind me that before the job I had been a capable person; it was unlikely that I'd lost my skills or talent. But I had lost something at that job--my motivation, confidence, and original purpose.
I'd taken the job, frankly, for the paycheck and because I knew I could do the work well. I craved balance and wanted to spend more time with my friends and on writing, but after a day of working this job I was sapped of the desire to do anything. Though I disrespected my manager, his goals became my goals. His moods became mine.
Much of this was my fault. I'm what life coach Martha Beck describes as a "Spongy" person who absorbs others' moods very easily. My challenge is learning to, well, wear an emotional rubber and become impervious to others' stress and frustration. But there was something else, and this something else I got in the Wharton Study.
A company's culture -- which, for the purposes of the study, is defined as "the unwritten norms and values surrounding how employees are valued as individuals" -- plays an important role in burnout, the researchers say. "We know that employees start identifying with an organization as soon as they join it," says Ramarajan. "The more they feel respected as a member of the group, the more likely they are to have that sense of identification. Respect is a way in which employees get entrenched into the workplace and feel that what they do is meaningful. Conversely, if they observe that people around them are disrespected, they come to a consensus that the organization doesn't treat people well."
While at Hell Job I researched burnout quite often. I knew that I'd exhibited some of the common personality traits of a burnout candidate before because I tended to over-identify with my work, but this time I found it difficult to figure out what it had to do with me. I certainly didn't overidentify with this job; I often avoided the topic of what I did for a living because I so actively disliked the company. But then why was I getting sucked in by it? Why didn't I leave sooner?
There are many reasons for burnout. We tend to think of the reasons that are our fault; for example, some people with unresolved childhood issues often play out pleasing their bosses to redeem themselves for affection they didn't
