CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY        

Burnout is a psychological response to stressors on job (Leiter, and Maslach, 2005) and leads to undesirable outcomes such as decreased job performance, job dissatisfaction, shifting of time spent on work-related activities to non-work activities, depression, discouragement, lower organizational commitment, increased absenteeism and turnover intentions (Shirom, 2003).

Past researches show that the important dimensions of job burnout i.e. exhaustion and disengagement from work can be observed in essentially any occupational group (Shani, and Pizam, 2009).

Moreover, Demerouti, (2003) define exhaustion as an extreme form of weakness caused by prolonged disclosure to specific working conditions.

It also refers to “results of intensive physical, affective, and emotional pressures, for example as a long-term consequence of extended exposure to certain demands”. Likewise, disengagement represents a major and deep reaction in terms of an emotional, cognitive, and behavioural rejection of the job. It is an occupational disillusionment (Freudenberger, 2014). Disengagement is defined as “distancing oneself from one’s work, and experiencing negative behaviour toward the work object, work content, or one’s work in general”. In today’s increasingly competitive and aggressive banking environment, competent bank executives view retention of motivated, satisfied, and committed service employees important to business success. It is also considered vital for customer satisfaction and retention. This is because service employees are a critical link in the provision of important services to customers and their actions are also essential for service recovery and improvements during the time of service failure (Yavas, 2007). Service employees have been recommended as supporters to build trust and positively impact customer’s attitudes and behaviours. In-role performance refers to employees’ behaviours that contribute to the effectiveness, success and overall organizational performance (Campbell, 2010). In this regard, (Singh, Goolsby, and Rhoads, (1994) offer three possible explanations for the influence and effectiveness of burnout on performance. First, burnout is characterized by a reduction and contraction of the available energy and the amount of effort that is invested to perform well. Second, employees with burnout get trapped and captured in a negative and vicious cycle, in which they are not inclined to search for support or are not motivated to change their situation, as a consequence their performance declines.

Finally, burnout sabotage employees’ self-confidence in their ability to solve work related issues and problems. It is not only a serious issue in itself but also results in reduction of individuals’ valuable physical, emotional, sentimental, and intellectual strength as well as resources.

One of the popular organizational strategies for establishing the organizational performance is to provide happy employees (Demerouit et al, 2014, 96; Wright and Cropanzano, 2000a, 2000b) by stimulating their motivation. Motivation is accepted as an important mechanism that drives human behavior which has an impact on important well-being outcomes (Rubino et al, 2009).

An important predictor of maintaining performance is known as motivation, which stimulates the employees to spend more time and energy in the organization. Motivation is apparently a psychological process (Rasu, 2014) that covers many aspects of job-related factors. On the other hand, work stress apparently affects the organizational culture. Regardless of the sector operating in, work stress has negative consequences on employees’ attitudes and behaviors.

Stress becomes inevitable when one works under some dynamic environment, which is not completely under one’s control. Stress may take many forms but being concerned with organisations and management sciences field, researchers are concerned about organisation related stress (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993). According to Maslach (1978) burnout is a behavioural condition of employees when they are not in a position to bear extra professional pressure and feel totally annoyed with the environment. Such feelings put them on the verge of the exit point where they tend to move from just-pleasant condition to start experiencing burnout. From that point they start reacting abnormally in the same setting, once they were comfortable in.

Stress is a complicated model. Stress is the response of a person to a stimulus that disturbs physical or mental equilibrium. In other words stress is the challenge or a threat to peoples’ well-being. Although some stresses are good and make you motivate; most others are bad and undermine both mental and physical health.

To make the best use of people as a valuable resource of the organization, attention must be given to the relationship between staff and the nature of their jobs. The organization’s work and the design of jobs can have a significant effect on staff. In this connection, the level of stress is also an important factor that may have impact on the employees’ behaviour.

An adverse level of stress affects overall performance of the organization. Further, from the employees’ point of view their stress is caused not only from the organizational factors but also from their individual factors such as family problem, death of close family member etc. Therefore to get an efficient outcome, organization should appropriately administer the level of stress. In order to achieve this objective, all the factors which lead to stress should be properly managed.

The level of stress is differed from a person to another. Positive stress will bring eagerness and enthusiasm to life, and negative stress will destroy the momentum of life. The impact of stress over the performance of employees’ is an interesting combination.

Job performance refers to whether an employee does his/her job well or not. Job performance consists of behaviors that employees do in their jobs that are relevant to the goals of the organization (Campbell, McCloy, Oppler and Sager, 1993).

Success of the organization depends on the performance of the employees. Most employees feel they will perform more effectively and efficiently when they are allowed to work with autonomy and lesser stress. On the other hand, when there is a higher stress, often results an increase level of staff turnover, absenteeism and work environment disputes.

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

Burnout is another influential factor in employees’ attitudes and behaviors which reduces the motivation as a result of reaction to job stress. It appears as one of the most negative outcomes among employees (Keel, 1993). Recent research shows that burnout is critical in explaining a wide range of behaviors and attitudes in high-stress work places (Lee and Ashforth, 1996).

Burnout is more often treated as a catalyst towards the deteriorated performance of the employees, specifically in service sector. Burnout is a kind of response which surfaces due to the lasting exposure towards various kinds of stressors, the important of those are the job related stressors. Burnout affects employees in three fold viz; emotional exhaustion, negative self-evaluation towards the personal accomplishment and depersonalisation – treating other people as if they were non-humans. Once these kinds of feelings are developed in the employees, it is inevitable for the employees and the organisations to bear costs which they would not have borne otherwise.

According to Cordes and Dougherty (1993), the main reasons for the burnout being felt by the employees are characterized into three broad categories of characteristics, which are:

1 job and role

2 organizational

3 personal characteristics.

Banks are continuously giving targets to its employees and pushing behind towards increasing of numbers. Due to insufficient staff, employees are loaded with heavy workload and assigned to multiple tasks with strict deadlines. Management see the risk of decreasing service levels of the bank employees and their motivational levels, and in a situation where unable to identify or calculate the magnitude of it.

The staff turnover ratio is high in this region which elaborates the stress level of the employees.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY  

The general objective of this study is to examine the