Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°2, 590-595
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.282 590
C
ORRELATION BETWEEN
M
ENTAL
H
EALTH
,
J
OB
I
NVOLVEMENT AND
J
OB
B
URNOUT OF
H
UMAN
R
ESOURCE
M
ANAGERS
Yiyi Chen
1*, Chengkun Liu
2, Wuwei Li
1Abstract
Job burnout is now a severe problem among employees. It is beneficial for individual and organizational development to fully understand job burnout. Therefore, this paper attempts to identify the correlation between mental health, job involvement and job burnout of human resource (HR) managers. The author carried out a questionnaire survey on 450 HR managers of state-owned enterprises in Beijing, China, and analysed the survey data on SPSS12.0. The results show that the HR managers are suffering from severe job burnout and poor mental health; their mental health has a significant positive correlation with job burnout and its three dimensions; job involvement has a significant negative correlation with job burnout; work pleasure has a significant negative correlation with the three dimensions of job burnout. The research results provide theoretical support to solving the job burnout of HR managers.
Key words: Human Resource (HR) Manager, Job Involvement, Mental Health, Job Burnout. Received: 19-02-19 | Accepted: 12-08-19
INTRODUCTION
With the continuous development of social economy, people have been faced with more fierce competition and greater pressure in their work, which will lead to some negative emotions such as anxiety and confusion, and even a phenomenon of burnout after a certain of time. This is not conductive to the normal development of people's physical and mental health (Tokuda, Hayano, Ozaki et al., 2009). At present, burnout has become a “common
disease” for many workers, and gradually
developed into one of the important issues of concern to the whole society. Like many other laborers, HR managers are also facing the problem of burnout, especially in the current situation that the enterprise pays more attention to HR management. Also, compared with the traditional HR management, the current
1 School of Business, Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics,
Zhengzhou 450015, China. 2School of Business, Macau
University of Science and Technology, Macau 999078, China. E-Mail: [email protected]
HR management has changed dramatically (Ostermann, Bertram, & Büssing, 2010). During the current development of HR management, HR managers are facing increasing challenges and pressures. Failing to effectively solve the potential problem of burnout will have adverse effects on individuals and enterprises (Pines, Neal, Hammer et al., 2011). The research on the burnout of HR managers can not only effectively overcome various obstacles in their work, promote their own development, but also contribute to the long-term development of enterprises (Mcdonald, Murray, & Atkin, 2014).
At present, many scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of research on burnout, and also achieved various valuable research results. However, most of these researches centred around the helping profession, such as police, and nurses etc., and there have been relatively few researches on the burnout of HR managers (Shyman, E. 2011). In addition, the research results mainly focus on the theoretical aspects and review studies, rather than the empirical studies (Wang, Xie, Dai et al., 2014). Therefore, it is an urgent problem to analyse the
YIYI CHEN,CHENGKUN LIU,WUWEI LI
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occupational burnout of HR managers and study their characteristics and influencing factors.
This paper attempts to study the correlation between mental health, job involvement and burnout of HR managers through SPSS12.0. For this, it uses questionnaire survey method to collect sample data, and finally puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions for effectively solving the problem of burnout. It’s
expected to provide a theoretical basis for the research of HR managers' burnout, and also valuable reference for solving the possible problem of HR managers' burnout.
BASIC CONCEPTS AND STATUS ANALYSIS
Burnout concept
Burnout was first proposed by American psychologist Freudenberger in 1974. It is mainly used to describe the state of physical and mental exhaustion experienced by practitioners of the helping industry in the face of great work stress (Te Boekhorst, Willemse, Depla et al., 2008). Afterwards, many experts and scholars have done a lot of research on burnout from different angles and theories, and formed different interpretations of the concept of burnout. But among these different interpretations there is a common view, that is, burnout is a state of exhaustion caused by the inability of practitioners to cope with stress at work, which is an extreme reaction under abnormal conditions (Wang, Kunaviktikul, & Wichaikhum, 2013). Most scholars divide the burnout into three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment (Lizano, & Leeanne, 2015). Each dimension has its own definition, which is shown in detail in Table 1.
Table 1.
Definition of Dimensions of Job
Burnout
Dimension Definition Emotional
exhaustion
Feelings of depletion of individual emotional and cognitive
resources
De personalization
Individuals ‘negative, indifferent attitude to work or reaction to extreme separation from work, lack of enthusiasm for work
Low personal accomplishment
Decreased self-efficacy, lack of achievement and competence
Status analysis of HR management
With the continuous deepening of China's market economy, HR has increasingly become an important asset for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. Under this circumstance, enterprises have put forward higher requirements for the professional construction of HR managers (Tourigny, Baba, & Wang, 2010). Meanwhile, enterprises are increasingly demanding practitioners with advanced knowledge and skills in HR management. In recent years, the number of service organizations in China's HR industry and the number of practitioners in HR services have shown a growing trend, as shown in Figure 1. However, compared with foreign developed countries, the overall quality of China's HR managers still needs to be improved (Koustelios & Tsigilis, 2005).
In the organization, HR managers play different roles, in order to be competent for their functional work (Happell & Koehn. 2011). There are six main roles in Figure 2.
Figure 1
.
Total market supply of
China’s
human resources industry in2014-2018
Figure 2
.
Professional Role Model of Human
Resource Managers
Expert
Business partners
Change agent
Knowledg e Manager
Employee Server Strategic
partners
2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 0
10 20 30 40 50 60
N
u
mb
er
Year
Service organization Practitioners
CORRELATION BETWEEN MENTAL HEALTH, JOB INVOLVEMENT AND JOB BURNOUT OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS 592
RESEARCH DESIGN
Research objects
This paper selects 450 HR managers of state-owned enterprises in Beijing as the research objects, and collects relevant data using the questionnaires. A total of 450 questionnaires were distributed and all were recovered, with a recovery rate of 100%. Among them, there were 436 valid questionnaires, with the effective rate of 96.9%. In the questionnaire, some items were survey based on the personal information of the respondents, including gender, age, marital status, education, and job rank. The basic information of the respondents is shown in Table 2.
Table 2.
Basic information of the sample
Item Classification Quantity Percentage (%) Gender Male 304 69.7
Female 132 30.3
Age
<30 107 24.6
30-40 206 47.2
>40 123 28.2
Marital status
Married 284 65.1
Unmarried 152 34.9
Education
College and
below 98 22.4
Undergraduate 193 44.3
Postgraduate
and above 145 33.3
Job rank
Assistant 112 25.7
Commissioner 208 47.7
Executive
director 116 26.6
Research tools (1) Burnout Scale
Based on the Maslach Burnout Inventory by Maslach et al., a questionnaire scale on the burnout degree of research objects were formed. It contained 22 items, using the 5-level scale method. The higher score indicates more serious burnout (Eisenstat & Felner. 1984). Also, according to the scores, the respondents were divided into four states of groups, namely severe burnout, mild burnout, general burnout and no burnout.
(2) Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90)
This paper mainly uses the most common SCL-90 by many experts and scholars, to study the mental health status of HR managers. This scale mainly included six different factors such
as somatization and obsessive-compulsive disorder etc., and 90 items using a 5-level scale. The higher score means a worse mental health (Lachterman, Meir, Lachterman et al., 2004).
(3) Work engagement scale
This scale was mainly composed of 17 items from three dimensions of importance, concentration and pleasure of the work using the 5-level rating method. The higher score indicates more work input of the respondents.
(4) Statistical processing
T test and correlation analysis were performed for all the data obtained through the questionnaire using the SPSS12.0 software.
EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ANALYSIS
Job burnout and mental health status of HR managers
Figure 3 and Table 3 mainly show the analysis results of the job burnout for HR managers. It can be seen from Figure 3, only 9.5% of HR managers felt no burnout, and more than 90% had different levels of burnout, indicating that burnout exists widely in HR management.
Table 3 mainly analyses the three dimensions of job burnout. It can be seen that HR managers scored higher in three dimensions, indicating that the HR managers of state-owned enterprises in Beijing generally have the problem of burnout.
Table 4 mainly lists the results of the mental health status of HR managers. It can be seen that the scores of HR managers on the five factors were significantly higher than the domestic norm, which indicates the HR managers of Beijing state-owned enterprises are in a poor state of mental health.
Figure 3
.
Overall situation of job burnout of
human resource managers
9.5% 12.8% 53.2%
24.5%
Mild burnout General burnout Severe burnout Tireless
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Table 3.
Job Burnout of Human Resource Managers
Dimension M SD
Emotional exhaustion 2.73 0.56
De personalization 1.96 0.58
Low personal accomplishment 2.54 0.64
Table 4.
Mental health status of human resource managers
Factor Human Resource Manager(M±SD) Domestic norm(M±SD) t Including somatization 1.95±0.79 1.35±0.51 9.96***
Obsessive-compulsive disorder 2.14±0.81 1.72±0.64 10.01***
Interpersonal sensitivity 1.82±0.83 1.52±0.49 4.31***
Depression 1.92±0.84 1.49±0.57 9.02***
Anxiety 1.82±0.79 1.25±0.63 8.17*** Correlation between job burnout and
mental health status
In order to further analyse the relationship between mental health and burnout of HR managers in state-owned enterprises in Beijing, SPSS12.0 software was used for correlation analysis.
Table 5.
The correlation between job burnout
and mental health
Job burnout SCL-90 Pearson Correlation 1 0.512***
Sig.(2-tailed) 0.000
The data in Table 5 shows that there is a significant positive correlation between mental health and burnout of HR managers.
The correlation data of Table 6 shows that there was a significant positive correlation between the factors of mental health and the three dimensions of burnout. The worse the mental health, the stronger the job burnout. Therefore,
more attentions should be paid to the mental health problems of HR managers for reducing the risk of burnout. The organization can arrange some group building activities or hold psychological counselling lectures to alleviate the psychological pressure of HR managers, enhance their mental health to promote their job identity, and further improve their work quality and efficiency (Yom, 2013).
Correlation between job burnout and job involvement
In addition, in order to further study the relationship between the job involvement and the burnout of HR managers in state-owned enterprises in Beijing, SPSS12.0 software was used for correlation analysis.
The data results in Table 7 shows that there was a significant negative correlation between the job involvement of HR managers and job burnout.
Table 6.
The correlation between factors of job burnout and factors of SCL-90
Emotional exhaustion
(1)
De personalization
(2)
Low personal accomplishment
(3)
Including somatization
(4)
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (5)
Interpersonal sensitivity (6)
Depression (7)
Anxiety (8)
(1) 1.000
(2) 0.426*** 1.000
(3) 0.278*** 0.323*** 1.000
(4) 0.163*** 0.496*** 0.419*** 1.000
(5) 0.417*** 0.108*** 0.703*** 0.606*** 1.000
(6) 0.239*** 0.636*** 0.516*** 0.487*** 0.583*** 1.000
(7) 0.614*** 0.577** 0.129*** 0.427*** 0.371*** 0.725*** 1.000
(8) 0.385*** 0.307*** 0.636*** 0.611*** 0.254*** 0.361*** 0.774*** 1.000
Table 7.
The correlation between Job involvement and Job burnout
Job burnout Job involvement Pearson Correlation 1 -0.627***
CORRELATION BETWEEN MENTAL HEALTH, JOB INVOLVEMENT AND JOB BURNOUT OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGERS 594
Table 8.
The correlation between factors of job burnout and factors of Job involvement
Emotional exhaustion (1)
De personalization (2)
Low personal accomplishment (3)
Importance (4)
Concentration degree (5)
Pleasure (6)
(1) 1.000
(2) 0.127*** 1.000
(3) -0.543*** -0.425*** 1.000
(4) 0.412*** -0.288*** -0.518*** 1.000
(5) 0.384*** 0.529*** -0.337*** 0.796*** 1.000
(6) -0.496*** -0.384*** -0.616*** 0.605*** 0.824*** 1.000
The correlation data of Table 8 showed that work importance and concentration were positively correlated with the emotional exhaustion, but negatively correlated with low personal accomplishment; work pleasure was significantly negatively correlated with the three dimensions of burnout. That is, the more pleasure the job has, the lower the sense of job burnout. Therefore, the organization should continuously improve the interest of the HR manager in the work itself, enhance the job involvement, increase the recognition of the practitioners to the organization, thereby promoting the overall efficiency of the individual and the organization.
CONCLUSIONS
Taking the HR managers of state-owned enterprises in Beijing as the research objects, this paper studies the correlation between the mental health, job involvement and job burnout of the HR managers using the questionnaire and statistical analysis method. The specific conclusions are as follows:
(1) The HR managers of state-owned enterprises in Beijing are in poor mental health state with obvious job burnout;
(2) There was a significant positive correlation between mental health and job burnout, and between different factors of mental health and three dimensions of burnout, that is, the worse the mental health, the stronger the sense of burnout. The risk of burnout should be reduced by changing the psychological state of HR managers;
(3) There was a significant negative correlation between job involvement and job burnout; work importance and concentration were positively correlated with emotional exhaustion, but negatively correlated with low personal accomplishment; there were significant negative correlations between work pleasure and burnout. Therefore, it is necessary to
increase the work interest of HR managers, enhance work involvement, and continuously improve the efficiency of individuals and organizations.
Acknowledgement
National Social Science Foundation of China, Research on Impact of top management team faultlines on Growth Performance of Chinese Private Enterprises, 17BGL041.
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