Giving Employees Control Prevents Burnout

The best way to prevent employee burnout is by giving workers more control, said Daniel C. Ganster, chair of the University of Arkansas’ management department.

“If you want to stay motivated — charged up about your job — give people some meaningful control over their jobs,” said Ganster, who has spent 20 years studying job stress.

Ganster is talking about something beyond autonomy. He’s talking about decision making. He said employees need to be entrusted with responsibility for a particular area, whether it be the development of Macintosh computers (as Apple did) or cleaning a restroom. And the employee should be allowed to do the job without interruption. Micromanagement is detrimental to employee productivity because it shows the employee he has no area that is his responsibility or that his employer doesn’t trust him to do his job properly.

“People who feel they have a certain amount of control in their jobs are able to withstand a lot higher level of demands,” Ganster said.

Burnout or Boredom

Ganster differentiates between “burnout” and “boredom.” Burnout traditionally refers to high-stress jobs that result in “emotional exhaustion,” such as police officers and child-protection services workers.

“With burnout, either you can’t stand it anymore — it just tears you up — or you become depersonalized to it,” he said.

Boredom is at the other end of the spectrum. With boredom, control and challenge are the answers, he said.

A study of civil service workers in England during the 1990s indicated an “inverse social gradient” when it comes to mortality rates from coronary heart disease.

In other words, the Whitehall study showed that lower-level employees such as clerical and office support staff who had very little control over their jobs (and were probably bored) were more likely to die at younger ages of heart disease than administrators who had more control over their jobs.

They feel powerless in the face of demands over which they have no control, Ganster said. “They need some kind of challenge.”

Control had more of an impact on the lower-level workers than the usual risk factors for heart disease, Ganster said.

A 1984 study indicates that professors and other teachers have a mortality rate for arteriosclerotic heart disease that’s about half that of doctors, lawyers, pharmacists and insurance agents.

Big Stressors

The most common job stressors, according to research by Ganster and Larry Murphy, are: 1) role stressors, such as role conflict and ambiguity; 2) workload stressors, such as work overload, tight deadlines, working too many hours and working at a too rapid pace; 3) job insecurity; 4) stressful interpersonal interactions and lack of social support; and 5) lack of control.

These stressors affect mental and physical health as well as the workplace, Ganster said.

Ganster and Murphy wrote a chapter on “Workplace Interventions to Prevent Stress-Related Illness: Lessons from Research and Practice” for a book titled “Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Linking Theory with Practice.” The book was published last year.

“Health risks caused by psychological work conditions can harm the corporate bottom line as well as the employees themselves,” according to the chapter on stress-related illness he co-authored with Murphy.

U. S. News & World Report ranked the UA’s management department 28th nationally among public undergraduate business schools in the magazine’s issue on “America’s Best Colleges 2002.” It was the first time the magazine ranked departments within a college.