Customer-related social stressors and burnout.
Although almost all literature on burnout implicitly assumes that burnout is primarily caused by stressful employee-customer interactions, only a few studies have addressed this empirically. A principal-components analysis of a newly developed instrument assessing various forms of customer-related social stressors (CSS) in 3 different service jobs (N = 591) revealed 4 themes of CSS: disproportionate customer expectations, customer verbal aggression, disliked customers, and ambiguous customer expectations. These 4 CSS predict burnout beyond a variety of control variables. Contrary to other predictors of burnout analyzed in previous studies, the amount of variance explained in exhaustion (14%) by the 4 CSS scales is not higher than for personal accomplishment (14%) and is considerably lower than for depersonalization (23%).
Dormann
Christian
C
Department of Psychology, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany. Dormann@psych.uni-frankfurt.de
Zapf
Dieter
D
D000328:Adult; D002055:Burnout, Professional / Q000523:psychology*; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D009790:Occupations; D012044:Regression Analysis