Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services
Tiffany Monroe
BSHS/462- Effective Management of Human Service Organization
May 20, 2013
Latera Davis

Causes and Prevention of Burnout in Human Services
The human service field faces a major issue of burnout among their employees. In this paper I will define burnout and describe some of the factors of burnout. I will examine my own personality and share my reactions and responses to personal and work related stress. I will also discuss my response to an employee burnout as a human service manager.
Burnout
According to Johnson and Stone (1987), burnout refers to a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion resulting from involvement with people in emotionally demanding situations (p. 67). There are three major factors of burnout: emotional exhaustion, feeling of low personal accomplishment with clients, and a sense of depersonalization or possessing an uncaring attitude towards clients. When an employee shows physical burnout signs, this includes the appearance of fatigue, frequent absentees from work, having physical complaints, and weight loss. Behavioral signs of burnout include isolation, withdrawal from work responsibilities, procrastination, the use of alcohol, drugs, over eating of food, frequent outbursts of anger toward other workers, and increase absentee from work. Emotional signs include feeling helpless, personal failure, detachment from work and others, decrease of satisfaction, and an increase of cynicism
Factors of Burnout The causes of burnout may be the combination of cultural, lack of social support, individual, organizational, or supervisory. One study found that “high emotional demands, high demands for hiding emotions, high quantitative demands, high work place, low possibilities for development, low meaning of work, low predictability, low role-clarity and high conflict