Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services Staff

Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services Staff

BSHS/462

Regina Attoh-Mensah

Instructor: Jane Flournoy

Burnout is an issue in human services organizations staff experienced at any time. Working in human services organization is an overwhelming situation that can easily ruin employees' life. Employees deal with intense cases that make them stressful, and allow them doing more overtimes. That is called burnout. This paper is to define burnout, and discuss some of the individual, cultural, organizational, supervisory, and social support factors that cause burnout. This paper wills also mention various individual, job role, and organizational methods to prevent burnout. Through this paper, Regina will examine her own personality and share how she will react and respond to her personal and work-related stress, and reduce the effects of burnout (Lewis, Packard, & Lewis, 2007). At last Regina will bring in her point of view about the way to assist other staff as a human service agent.

Burnout can be a state of exhaustion cause by overwork and stress. To define burnout at work is to refer to the state of feeling an overwhelming sensation, and some depression cause by an important level of high stress related to the working place. Burnout can be detected by some irritation, lack of motivation, fatigue that cause headaches, not be capable to bring new ideas, be always angry. A human services agent burnout does not want to do anything. Burnout has three major factors that are "emotional exhaustion, feelings of low personal accomplishment with clients, and a sense of depersonalization feelings" (Lewis, Packard, & Lewis, 2007, p. 133). Burnout cause at work allows someone to feel like possessing little or no control over the work. That produces lack of recognition or rewards for good work. Developing burnout is to do monotonous or unchallenging work. Sometimes there is burnout when the work in a chaotic or high-pressure environment.

The text explains that the possible causes of burnout can be:

* Individual--Personality factors (for example, "Type A") or unrealistically high career goals or expectations may predispose individuals to become burned out.

* Organizational norms--Bureaucratic rather than flexible management philosophies, lack of feedback, a competitive climate, large amounts of conflict, and low openness, and trust can contribute to burnout.

* Organizational roles--Burnout may be more likely if an individual is experiencing role conflict (disagreements about expectations), ambiguity (unclear expectations), or overload (too much work); has a job with low motivating potential (see the prior section on job design); or has low autonomy.

* Supervision and social support--Lack of participative decision-making increases the likelihood of burnout.

* Cultural--Aspects of the culture at large, including a declining feeling of community, frustrated expectations for the self-actualizing potential of work, and pervasive competition, create a climate conducive to burnout (Lewis, Packard, & Lewis, 2007, p.