CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
The global shift in spotlight from the production of goods to service provision has led to the expansion of the service sector in most global economies (Campbell & Rothmann, 2005). This however might not have come without any price. The concomitant of such shift may be seen from the perspective of the manifestation of burnout which is common among human service providers. Although a number of studies have revealed that burnout is not limited to the human service professions (e.g., Bakker, Demerouti, & Schaufeli, 2002), the syndrome is nonetheless generally common among human services providers (Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998). Human service professions are typified by close face-to-face interactions with people, both employees as well as clients on a daily basis. Accordingly, burnout is a psychological and physical outcome of prolonged or chronic and high levels of job stress (Demerouti, Bakker, & Leiter, 2014; Khamisa, Peltzer, & Oldenburg, 2013; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001; Matin, Kalali, & Anvari, 2012; Ozyurt, Hayran, & Sur, 2006). It is a typical occurrence among employees who are incapable of dealing with far-reaching work pressures which demands on their energy, time, and resources especially among employees whose work entails dealing with people (Adebayo & Ezeanya, 2011). The research on this syndrome is predicated in caring and service jobs, since these kinds of jobs are rooted on the relationship between provider and recipient (Maslach et al., 2001), for example, students, pupils, clients, or patients. Burnout is a common psychological manifestation of job-related health problems (Schaufeli, Leiter, & Maslach, 2009) that is mostly prevalent among individuals who are in emotionally demanding conditions (van der Ploeg & Kleber, 2003). That is, burnout occurs when an individual feels emotionally drained and as such manifests detached attitude at work.
Traditionally, burnout is defined as a syndrome that is characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment which commonly occurs among individuals whose job requires working with people in some capacity (Maslach & Jackson, 1981, 1986; Wu, Li, Wang, Yang, & Qiu, 2011). However, in the present study, burnout is confined to the emotional exhaustion and depersonalization dimensions. These two dimensions are usually regarded as the core burnout components, whereas personal accomplishment plays a divergent and far less important role, because it is only weakly related to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization (or cynicism) and has different patterns of predictors and outcomes (Bakker, Demerouti, & Euwema, 2005; Heuven & Bakker, 2003; Schaufeli, Bakker, & van Rhenen, 2009; Schaufeli & Taris, 2005). Besides, the authors (i.e., Maslach & Jackson, 1981) of the scale with which burnout is measured acknowledged from the outset that ?Personal Accomplishment subscale is independent of the other subscales and that its component items do not load negatively on them? (pp. 101 and 104). Based on the incongruous nature of the personal accomplishment dimension, the present study adopted Schaufeli and Bakker?s (2004) suggestion and explored only the two core dimensions of burnout following their discovery that personal accomplishment constitutes element of engagement rather than of burnout since it loaded on engagement factor but not on burnout factor.
Emotional exhaustion refers to feelings of being emotionally stretched to breaking point and drained of one?s emotional resources, while depersonalization involves a negative, uninterested, or overly impersonal attitude or responses to others, especially the recipients of one?s services or care (Adebayo & Ezeanya, 2011; Demerouti et al., 2014; Fernet, Austin, Tr?panier, & Dussault, 2013; Kaur & Luxmi, 2013; Jawahar, Stone, & Kisamore,