Does Burnout Really Impact Productivity?

I have been posting about burnout this month. Burnout is the eighth symptom from my article, “9 Symptoms of Highly Ineffective Leaders." While I believe that burnout affects performance, I wanted to ensure that there was research to back up my supposition. I found three interesting studies that show that performance is adversely impacted by symptoms of stress:

1. Emotional exhaustion. A study of nurses that was published in Business, Engineering and Industrial Applications in 2001, showed that emotional exhaustion was the dominant factor that affected job performance.

2. Chronic burnout. An article published in 2005 in Biological Psychology stated that patients with chronic burnout have specific cognitive impairments.

3. Emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. A study of bank workers in International Journal of Social Science and Humanity in 2011, showed that the performance of workers studied decreased due to increasing emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

Employees and leaders are both responsible for ensuring that expectations and the environment support employees being motivated and productive. When conditions change and employees start heading down the burnout trail, leaders and employees can stop the burnout before it becomes an issue.

Ineffective leaders can cause burnout. Good leaders can ensure that burnout is caught before it starts impacting performance.

To read what leaders can do when burnout starts, click on "Is Crispy Around the Edges too Late?"

To learn the causes of burnout and what to do about them, click on "4 Major Causes of Burnout."

To understand how to address burnout, click on "Top Three Ways to Address Burnout."

Want to talk about burnout? Yours or your teams? Call me Valerie.MacLeod@HainesCentre.com