The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to do About It

Christina Maslach and Michael P Leiter. The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to do About It. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997, 186 pages, $25.00.

Reviewed by VK Kumar, Professor, and Paul D. Weil, Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester, PA. The catchy title, The Truth About Burnout, is bound to attract the attention of those book browsers who hate their jobs, feel angry and worn out, and are consumed with feelings of cynicism and hopelessness. Can this book help relieve their distress? The answer is no-it is not a self-help manual about individual stress management tools such as meditation and biofeedback.

Readers will quickly discover that the authors assign major responsibility to organizations for addressing the burnout problem. They challenge the conventional wisdom of treating burnout as an individual's problem: People do not burn out because of flaws in their character, behavior, or productivity. . . [O]ur research argues emphatically otherwise... we believe that burnout is. . . a problem of. . . the social environment in which people work. The structure and functioning of the workplace shape how people interact with one another and how they carry out their jobs. Thus, their major focus is to present an analysis of the burnout issue and heuristics for bringing about organizational changes to make workplaces inherently engaging and rewarding.

This brief book by two dedicated scholars contains seven chapters with an afterword, appendix, endnotes, and a short list of references. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the essential themes concerning the definition of burnout, its causes, consequences, and cure. The other six chapters pursue the same ideas with added details, explanations, arguments, along with short individual and organizational illustrative cases drawn broadly from schools, universities, hospitals, and corporations. The book is easy to read for people who lack the time or the wherewithal with which...