Archive

Welcome to the archives. These articles represent many different seasons of my career. You’ll find posts written during my doctoral studies, years of marketing consulting, entrepreneurial experiments, and the occasional reflection on whatever happened to be capturing my attention at the time.

Blogging looked very different when many of these posts were published. Rather than removing them or fixing broken links from now defunct themes, I’ve chosen to preserve them as a snapshot of where I was, what I was learning, and how my thinking has evolved over the years.

Some ideas have stood the test of time. Others reflect the questions I was wrestling with at that particular moment. Either way, they tell part of the story.

Burnout

by | Apr 12, 2020 | High Attrition

So what is burnout, anyway?

Burnout consists of three terms:

  • Emotional exhaustion
  • Depersonalization
  • Diminished personal accomplishment (Maslach & Jackson, 1986).

Emotional exhaustion is by far the most researched and reported facet of burnout.  Now watch how it interacts with people and situations.

We all have the ability to choose how we react to a situation.  People with a higher sense of self-awareness are said to have higher emotional intelligence.  Can’t people with higher emotional intelligence just simply choose to react differently to a given situation?  Can’t they just get over it?

Researchers have found a definitive link between a person’s emotional intelligence and his or her overall level of job satisfaction.  But this is not a direct relationship.  Emotional exhaustion plays a role between the two (Moon & Hur, 2011).

Emotional Intelligence —>  Emotional Exhaustion —>  Job Satisfaction

What has surprised researchers about this arrangement is that people with high degrees of emotional intelligence are not always immune to burnout (Moon & Hur, 2011).

Reference

Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1986). Maslach Burnout Inventory manual (2nd ed.). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.

Moon, T., & Hur, W. (2011). Emotional intelligence, emotional exhaustion, and job performance. Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal, 39(8), 1087-1096. doi:org/10.2224/sbp.2011.39.8.1087