The gradually increasing pressure of the organization¡¦s job demands becomes a universal and unchangeable fact. Most studies focused on the normal causal relationships between work stress and its outcomes rather than the reversed and reciprocal relationships between them. From the view points of drift hypothesis and gain and loss spiral resulting from the conservation of resource theory, the present study probed the reciprocal relationships between job characteristics, burnout and health. Two-wave panel data were collected from nurses both in public and private hospitals in southern Taiwan. Pre-test data were used to test the Cronbach's £\ and confirmatory factor analysis for each scale. Structural equation modeling implemented with AMOS 5.0 was employed to test the fitness of the hypothesized models. Through a series of nested models competing, our findings showed that the final models fitted well to the data. Our results proved some cross-lagged effects including the normal causal relationships between psychosocial job characteristics and burnout, the reversed causal relationships between burnout and mental, physical health, burnout has partial mediating relationships between psychosocial job characteristics and mental, physical health, and the reciprocal causal relationships between psychosocial job characteristics, burnout, and mental, physical health. According to our findings, managerial implications can be suggested that managers should pay attention to employees¡¦ burnout and introduce some managerial practices immediately in order to prevent the harmful outcomes of health. It can be achieved by higher job control to alleviate employees¡¦ job strain. Organizations should increase employee¡¦s job control such as job redesign, flexible work schedules, and goal setting. In addition, burnout can be affected by mental and physical health as well. From the viewpoint of organizational intervention, stress management programs can help to improve employees¡¦ physical and mental health, which will in turn release employee¡¦s burnout. Organizations will gain a competitive advantage if they make better use of their human resources.

For recent years domestic economy is going down and down. From early 1990¡¦s growing competitiveness caused by the openings of many new banks in the limited financial market lowers the profitability of banks. Moreover, the amount of over-due loan is increasing because of poor loan quality, moving-out of traditional industries and increasing unemployment rate. Under the impact of dramatic change of circumstances, the stress which clerks now under is growing. Former days the position of clerks is thought to be stable and well paid. Nowadays clerks, however, are under the threat of being laid-off and various uncertainties and apt to tiredness of job. Present investigation is trying to find out stress source of clerks. The relation between stress source with burnout and working attitude is also investigated to find out ways of releasing pressure, decreasing burnout and building-up good working attitude. Present investigation was accomplished through questionnaires. Major findings are the following: 1.Among the job characteristics, burnout is decreased with increasing working autonomy and task identity; increasing the skill variety, task significance and working feedback can prevent from decreasing professional efficacy in the burnout category. 2.Regarding role stress, increasing confliction, ambiguity, over-load (quantitative) and over-load (qualitative) tend to increase emotion exhaustion in the burnout category; increasing ambiguity enhances decreasing professional efficacy in the burnout category. 3.Maintaining better relationship with supervisor, colleague, subordinate and organization can restrain emotion exhaustion and professional efficacy decrease in the burnout category. 4.Regarding personality, emotion exhaustion and professional efficacy decrease in the burnout category can be decreased by type-A personality. 5.From aspect of job characteristics, service attitude can be improved by increasing working autonomy, task identity, skill variety, task significance and working feedback; resigning intention can be restrained by increasing working autonomy. 6.Regarding role stress, increasing ambiguity makes service attitude more poor; resigning intention is enhanced by increasing confliction, over-load (quantitative) and over-load (qualitative). 7.Maintaining better relationship with supervisor, colleague, subordinate and organization can enhance better service attitude; resigning intention is restrained. 8.Increasing emotion exhaustion in the burnout category enhances resigning intention. 9.Service attitude becomes poorer by more professional efficacy decrease. 10.Regarding stress source job characteristics, role stress and personal relationship have outstandingly direct effect on emotion exhaustion and professional efficacy decrease in the burnout category; burnout has distinctively direct effect on service attitude and resigning intention in the working attitude category. 11.From aspect of service attitude, task identity and task significance in the job characteristics category have mediating effect on burnout; As to resigning intention, working autonomy in the job characteristics category has mediating effect on burnout. 12.Burnout has mediating effect between roll stress and working attitude; from aspect of service attitude, there is no mediating effect between roll stress and burnout; from aspect of resigning intention, roll stress has mediating effect between roll conflict and burnout. 13.Burnout has mediating effect between personal relationship and working attitude; from aspect of service attitude, personal relation has mediating effect between relation with supervisor and burnout; from aspect of resigning intention, personal relation has no mediating effect between relation with supervisor and burnout. 14.Burnout has mediating effect between personality and working attitude; from aspect of service attitude, there is no mediating effect between Type-A personality and burnout; from aspect of resigning intention, there is mediating effect between Type-A personality and burnout.

As refresher courses are getting popular in Taiwan, it is good news for those who want to continue their studies at the same time of working. However, an individual social role will be getting more complicated during this situation of inter-role conflicts. While a full-time worker also needs to act as a student after work, will he encounter the inter-role conflicts of learning and working? This study aims on students who are taking refresher courses at public or private two-year junior college, two-year college, and university in Kaohsiung. We try to discuss the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout of students who are taking refresher courses. We indicate the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout due to different background characteristics of respondents. The study result is supported by empirical data and provides some suggestions for those who want to take refresher courses and further researchers. We send out 800 questionnaires and get 602 returned ones. The final valid questionnaires are 589 and the return rate is 76.62%. The result is indicated as below: 1. Most of respondents in this study are female, single, and study in national two-year junior college right now. Their tenure in current company is 1-5 years. Most of them have strong motivation of self actualization even they all play different social roles now. The age of most respondents is between 31-40 and most of them work in manufacturing industries and would prefer to study at school in short distance. 2. The result indicates the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on learning attitude. Besides, the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on interpersonal relationship alienation. The three kinds of inter-role conflicts all have strong impact on low learning emotion. Furthermore, the inter-role conflicts which learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on emotion burnout. 3. The moderation effects of families¡¦ support, managers¡¦ support, colleagues¡¦ support and classmates¡¦ support are partially supported in this study.

Background/Objectives: Compassion fatigue (CF) is severe emotional and physical exhaustion resulting from unresolved burnout and/or secondary traumatic stress. Prevalent in registered nurses and physicians, CF negatively impacts both the caregiver and the care provided and is associated with job attrition. There is no direct measure for CF. Risk is assigned according to the intensity of each constituent part and the relationships between these parts. The purpose of this practice inquiry was to describe the risk for CF among doctor of nursing practice (DNP) students seeking nurse practitioner certification, a previously unstudied and potentially at-risk population. Design: A descriptive study was performed to describe: 1) the prevalence of compassion satisfaction; 2) the prevalence of burnout; 3) the prevalence of secondary traumatic stress; 4) the prevalence of risk profiles developed by Stamm (2010); and 5) the relationship between demographic characteristics and CF risk profiles in a sample of DNP students. Setting: The University of Arizona, College of Nursing between August 24, 2013 and November 19, 2013. Participants: 59 graduate nursing students seeking nurse practitioner certification and a DNP degree self-selected to participate in the study. Measurements: The Professional Quality of Life Scale-5 (ProQOL 5) was utilized to measure the components of CF: compassion satisfaction, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress. Patient demographics included: gender, age, years in nursing, nursing specialty, and employment status. Results: The DNP student population appears to be at-risk for CF, with 69% of the sample falling outside of the "low risk" CF profile. Stamm's (2010) five risk profiles were expanded to assign a level of risk to the 63% of participants who did not land in an existing profile. There were no statistically significant relationships between demographic variables and the expanded CF risk profiles, consistent with previous studies on the individual ProQOL components. A weak trend of increasing CF risk with years of nursing practice suggests that accumulated exposure to suffering increases CF risk. However, a small sample size and self-normalization in the ProQOL 5 limit the generalizability of the findings. Conclusion: DNP students are an at-risk population; therefore, we recommend incorporation of CF awareness and risk reduction into the DNP curriculum. Applicability of the ProQOL 5 test is hindered by scoring inconsistencies and self-normalization bias and we propose solutions. We additionally propose the concept of a single numeric index to quantify individual CF risk. Use of a single continuous variable pertaining to CF risk is likely to be crucial for future characterization, screening, and interventions.

Occupational stress of nurses has been widely researched, for example in specific health care units - intensive care, specific conditions - cancer. Personal characteristics like emotional involvement and depersonalisation of patients are also suggested as stressors for nurses. In South Africa the Department of Health has made a number of changes since 1994. One of the changes involved the restructuring of the different departments to unify the fragmented health services. No comparison study was found for professional and enrolled nurses. The objectives of this study were to determine the construct validity and internal consistency of the Nursing Stress Indicator (NSI) and to identify differences between occupational stressors of professional and enrolled nurses. A cross-sectional survey design was used. An random sample of professional nurses (N = 980) and enrolled (N = 800) nurses of seven of the nine provinces of South Africa were used. The NSI was developed as measuring instrument and administrated together with a biographical questionnaire. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. Five internally consistent factors were extracted. The first factor was labelled Stress: Patient Care. It relates to stress because of the care nursing staff provide to patients. The second factor was labelled Stress: Job Demands, and refer to the demands associated with the work of the nurse. The third factor indicated a lack of support in the organisation as well as from supervisors and colleagues, and was labelled Stress: Lack of Support. The fourth factor was labelled Stress: Staff Issues, because it included item loadings on things like shortage of staff, and fellow workers not doing their job. The fifth factor contains items concerning working hours, especially overtime, and was labelled Stress: Overtime. The results indicated that a difference in stress levels exists between professional and enrolled nurses. Professional nurses' severity for the different stressors are higher on all five the extracted factors than those of the enrolled nurses. The sources of occupational stress for professional and enrolled nurses were almost the same. One source of stress for professional nurses that the enrolled nurses did not experience is management of staff. Professional nurses (compared with enrolled nurses) obtained practically significant higher scores on two stressors, namely stress because of making a mistake when treating a patient and stress because of disagreement with medical practitioners or colleagues concerning the treatment of a patient. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

It is important to have a productive and healthy police service in South Africa and to research suicide ideation and burnout. The objectives of this research were to determine the relationship between suicide ideation, work stress and coping; to determine if work stress and coping can be used to predict suicide ideation; to determine the casual factors of suicide ideation; to determine if t he Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS) is a valid and reliable instrument to measure burnout; to determine the relationship between work stress and burnout and to determine if coping strategies can moderate or mediate the relationship between work stress an burnout. A cross-sectional survey design was used. A random sample (n = 340) was taken from police stations in the Western Cape. The Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire (ASIQ), MBI-GS, Police Stress Inventory (PSI), COPE questionnaire and a biographical questionnaire were administered. The results showed that job stress can indeed cause suicide ideation, but that an individual's coping response is a critical component in the determining of the impact of a stressor. Suicide ideation correlates statistically significant with job demands and a lack of resources, and job stress and coping can be used to predict suicide ideation in the SAPS. Avoidance, alcohol misuse, the presence of a medical condition, a previous suicide attempt, and rank are variants which could predict suicide ideation in the SAPS. The MBI-GS is a reliable and valid measuring instrument. Job stress leads to higher levels of exhaustion, which in turn leads to higher levels o f cynicism and lower levels of professional efficacy. Coping strategies c an moderate or mediate the relationship between job stress and burnout. Recommendations for the prevention and management of suicide ideation and burnout have been made, as well as recommendations with regard to future research on suicide ideation and burnout in the SAPS in the Western Cape. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Not much research regarding burnout amongst clergy in South Africa has been done. Recently a shift in the direction of positive psychology or salutogenesis took place and which highlighted two relatively new constructs, namely sense of coherence and engagement. Previous research in the "Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk" (NG Church) found a correlation between sense of coherence and burnout. In the "Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk van Afrika" (NH Church) however, no research regarding burnout within a salutogenic paradigm was ever done. The general objective of this research was to determine the levels and relationship of sense of coherence, coping, burnout and engagement amongst ministers of the NH Church. A cross-sectional research design was used. The Orientation to Life Questionnaire (OLQ), COPE-Questionnaire (COPE), Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) were used as measuring instruments on a stratified random (proportional) sample (n = 200) of ministers of the NH Church and from which 87 useable responses were received. Structural equation modelling was applied on the MBI-HSS to confirm a three-factor model with best fit. Cronbach alpha coefficients, inter-item correlation coefficients and factor analysis were used to determine the reliability and validity of the measuring instruments. Descriptive statistics, Pearson-product correlation coefficients, canonical correlation coefficients, and analysis of variance were used to analyse the data. The results showed that high levels of sense of coherence, approach coping and high levels of engagement are related to low levels of burnout, while venting of emotions are related to high levels of burnout. It was also found that sense of coherence and coping predicted emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and personal accomplishment. Furthermore, it was found that levels of emotional exhaustion for ministers in the age group 25-29, were consistently lower than that of any other age group in the sample, while levels for the age group 50-65 were also lower than that for ministers in the age groups 30-39 and 40-49, but still higher than levels for age group 25-29. Limitations of the study and recommendations regarding the organisation and future research were indicated. / Thesis (MA (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

The recent worldwide shift in focus from goods production to service provision in Western countries has resulted in the expansion of the service sector. The front-line worker has become a central figure in the new workplace, forming an important link between the company and the customer. The nature of the interaction between customer service staff and clients influences the perceived quality of service rendered by the company. Call centre work requires a high degree of personal contact with the public and the performance of emotional labour. Previous research found emotional labour to be a significant predictor of burnout. Given the above scenario, the lack of empirical research that systematically investigates burnout in a customer services environment in South Africa is a source of concern. The objectives of this study were to determine the construct validity and internal consistency of the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS) (Schaufeli, Leiter, Maslach & Jackson, 1996) in a customer services environment, and to compare the relationship of burnout with various demographic characteristics. A cross-sectional survey design was used. The study population consisted of an accidental sample of customer services personnel (N = 228). The Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS) was used to determine the level of burnout in the participants. A biographical questionnaire was used to gather additional information. Structural equation modelling (SEM) methods as implemented by AMOS were used to test the factorial model for the MBI-GS. Cronbach alpha coefficients and inter-item correlation coefficients were used to assess the internal consistency and construct validity of the MBI-GS. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the data. T-tests and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to determine differences between the sub-groups in the sample. Tukey tests were done to indicate which groups differed significantly when ANOVAS were done. The results confirmed a three-factor model of burnout, consisting of Exhaustion, Cynicism and Professional Efficacy. All three factors showed acceptable internal consistencies. The results also showed that customer service staff who measured high on exhaustion and cynicism (compared with those who measured low) experienced less job satisfaction. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

The global shortage of registered nursing practitioners is widely reported in the literature. This shortage can be attributed to a decrease in enrolments for nursing studies, fewer students graduating from nursing education programmes, more nurses leaving the profession shortly after completion of their studies, and other factors. Burnout amongst registered nurses may contribute to the above and can also serve as an indication of the reason these shortages in the nursing profession occur. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is also affected by the shortage of registered nurses. This shortage is increased by the involvement of the SANDF in peacekeeping missions outside South Africa. A need therefore exists for sufficient numbers of registered nursing personnel to qualify from the South African Military Health Services (SAMHS) Nursing College. In order to increase the number of students qualifying from this college and, to retain them after qualifying, research is needed regarding the occurrence of non-completion of studies at the college and the tendency to leave the SANDF shortly after qualifying. The objective of this study was to identify possible stressors (job demands and/or job resources) in the military nursing-student environment, to investigate their effects on students (burnout or engagement), and to assess whether it has any influence on their academic performance. A cross-sectional survey design was used. A sample of 167 nursing students (completing the four-year integrated nursing diploma) at second, third and fourth-year levels was obtained. The Clinical Environmental Characteristics Scale (CECS), developed by the authors, and the Wellness Survey (WS), together with a biographical questionnaire, were administered. The Wellness Survey (WS) include scales from three inventories, namely the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS - Maslach, Jackson & Leiter, 1996), Cognitive vii Weariness Scale (CWS - Van Horn, Taris, Schaufeli & Schreurs, in press) and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES - Shaufeli, Salanova, Gonzalez-Romh, & Bakker, 2002). Descriptive statistics, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, Pearson correlations and structural equation modelling were used to analyse the results. The results showed that job demands (consisting of overload, organisational influences and work-life balance) had a strong relationship with burnout (consisting of exhaustion, cynicism and cognitive weariness). A negative relationship was found between burnout and academic performance. Job resources (consisting of social support, growth and advancement, contact with others and organisational support) had a strong relationship with work engagement (consisting of vigour and dedication) and a significant negative relationship with performance (academic results). A negative relationship was also shown to exist between work engagement and academic performance. Recommendations for future research are made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

Employees in South African organisations are faced with increasing work pressures as economic and business factors (such as globalisation) lead to extensive restructuring, cost cutting and initiatives to continuously improve organisational processes. These conditions are conducive to the occurrence of burnout in the South African private sector. Burnout has been extensively researched in areas such as health services and law enforcement, however, the subject has received less focus in the private sector. Given the negative impact of burnout on employees and organisations, it becomes valuable to study burnout in this context. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between job demands, job resources, cognition and burnout. A cross-sectional survey design was used. Stratified random samples (N = 80) were taken from employees at a South African metals manufacturing company. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), Cognitive Flexibility Scale (CFS) and Job Demands-Resources Scale (JDRS) were administered. The reliability of the measuring instruments was assessed with the use of Cronbach alpha coefficients. Descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations) were used to analyse the data. Pearson correlations and multiple regression analyses were used to assess the relationships between job demands, job resources, burnout and cognition. The correlation coefficients indicated that cynicism is negatively related to growth opportunities and organisational support. Professional efficacy was positively related to organisational support, growth opportunities, advancement and cognitive flexibility. Multiple regression analysis showed that job demands, job resources, and cognitive flexibility predicted 18% of the variance in the exhaustion of employees. Job demands, job resources, and cognitive flexibility predicted 28% of cynicism and 44% of the variance in professional efficacy. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.Com. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.