Impact of Employee Burnout on Work Performance in an Organization

The topic we are willing to work on is “Impact of Employee Burnout on Work Performance in an Organization”. This is a widely discussed issue since many business organizations feel the importance of it. This report is conducted in focusing on National Bank Limited (NBL) at Gulshan branch to assess the impact of job stress that leads to burnout and may affect employee’s performance in many ways. This study seeks to fix the perceptions that the employees at National Bank Limited have, regarding the absence or presence of stress, burnout and whether they feel it affects them negatively or positively in their performance. It is very important to establish the problems that cause economic decline in the organization since it affects, in the long run, the economic stability of the country as a whole.

RELEVANCE TO THE BANK

Due to this the after certain period of time the employees overall performance declines stated by the management due to job stress and other relevant issues though the employees performed extra hours. As a result employee burnout occurred. So, Employee Burnout is the state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced emotional strength due to prolonged stress or frustration. Sometimes the cause is the work environment. Stressful jobs, immense wok loads, pressure, lack of support from co-workers, lack of resources, and tight deadlines can all contribute to burnout. Job burnout can affect physical and mental health. Other times, burnout has more to do with employees' expectations of themselves or their personal circumstances.

Burnout can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including the following:

• Frustration or indifference toward work and having trouble getting started at work
• Persistent irritability or impatience with co-workers,
• Anger, sarcasm, critical or being argumentative
• Exhaustion
• lack of satisfaction from your achievements
• Absenteeism

Burned-out employees cannot be an asset when it comes to productivity, even if burned-out employees quit this will add up the extra costs for replacement and training. It will definitely have impact in other employee’s performance and has a great effect in organization as well.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

It has been shown that stress and burnout have become one of the reasons which causes high costs to the organizations and employees in terms of high absenteeism and turnover in recent times and loss of many of the employer’s work-days and hours of productivity. Researchers and practitioners have, since the emergence of the important concept in the 1970s been inspired to study it and try to figure out ways of how to cope with it, prevent it or combat it. No matter the reasons for stress, most authors concur that stress is the most discreet killer of all at the workplace. The results of these researches depicted that stress in organization due to various relevance issues is always bad for the employees and the organizations too.

Many writers have gone to great lengths to differentiate between stress and the natural feelings of emotion that people go through as a biological cycle stimulated by different events.

Literature shows evidence that burnout negatively impacts task performance (Aswathappa, 2009). It is possible that stress and burnout exert significant effects on the employees’ performance, and thus, for those employees with the same job environment, different levels of stress and burnout may be observed depending on the moderators applied to the stressors (Aswathappa, 2009).

Theory suggests that the effects of chronic job stressors on the individual lead to burnout (Aswathappa, 2009). Burnout as a state of physical, emotional and physical exhaustion as well as cynicism to one’s work is found to lead to lower levels of performance by employees. The low levels of performance by employees will translate to reduced profitability of the organization at large.

Burnout is tri-dimensional behavioural response condition, e.g., emotional exhaustion, diminished personal accomplishment and depersonalisation (Maslach, 1982; Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Pines and Maslach, 1980). Jackson and Maslach (1982) termed burnout as umbrella concept having three dimensions, which are found to be interrelated to each other. Emotional exhaustion is the vital dimension of burnout, which refers to total exhaustion of emotional feelings of an employee. Depersonalisation is the second dimension of burnout and refers to employee’s isolated behaviour and his subsequent detachment from people around, including co-workers, clients, customers, subordinates and supervisors. The last dimension is diminished personal accomplishment; wherein employee underestimates his capabilities and negatively evaluates his achievements and accomplishments which is also termed as negative self-evaluation and feels ineffectiveness regarding actual job performance (Maslach et al., 2001).

Whilst there are varied reasons for any profitable organization to start making perpetual financial losses, there is prior to this research, no known study that was conducted to establish the impact of stress and burnout on the overall profitability of the organization.

METHODOLOGY

For our report we have selected one of the private banks of Bangladesh; National Bank Ltd. This bank is the first private bank that is fully owned by the nationals of Bangladesh. The board of directors are creative businessman and leading industrialist of the country and as a financial institutions to keep pace with time automated all the branches with computer networks. Mr. Choudhury Moshtaq Ahmed is the present Managing Director of the bank. The establishment of the bank was in the year 1983. Currently NBL is carrying their business through its 200 branches & Agro Branches spread all over the country creating opportunities to accommodate new customers by developing and expanding rural, SME financing and offshore banking facilities. This bank was born with a motto to revitalize the economy of the country with a small amount of employees when there is severe recession and from the very inception this bank play a vital role in the economy by bringing back the long forgotten taste of banking services. NBL is the first domestic bank that introduced international master card in Bangladesh.

Having noted that, the aim of the study is to establish if employees at National Bank Limited perceive their jobs as stressful and the consequence of the stressful conditions. It will investigate whether stress and burnout negatively affect employee performance as alluded to by existing literature

The objective of this study was to investigate whether stress and burnout are an issue in performance of employees at NBL, establish whether stress and burnout negatively affect performance of employees at NBL, to assess the impact of stress and burnout on employee performance, provide recommendations on how the negative effects of stress and burnout may be reduced or eliminated.

As a primary source of data, with the kind cooperation of Mr. D.M. Rafiqul Islam, current Senior Assistant Vice President of Gulshan corporate branch we were able to conduct a survey with 45 employees working in National Bank limited. They were really helpful throughout the process. A non-probability, convenience sampling technique was used to collect primary data. Each member of the research team was responsible for distributing questionnaires to members of the sample. To ensure confidentiality, respondents were given self-addressed, stamped envelopes in which to return their completed questionnaires.

RESULTS

We have observed National Bank Limited, Gulshan Branch for our project. The total respondents are 45. The demographic data of this particular branch shows male constituted 57.9% of the total respondents and female constituted rest of the 42.1%. Among them 63.1% of the respondents were married and 35.40% of the respondent were single however only less than 1% of the respondents were divorced. Most of the respondents were Master’s degree holders which is 52.6%, of the respondents. The respondents were graduate constituted 31.6% of the total sample size, only 5.3% of the respondents were higher degree holders.

We have divided our questionnaires in 4 different sections. Co-worker’s support, work related stress level, role overload, and intention to leave or decision line. According to our observation in 6 criteria the Co-worker’s support questions we found out most of the co-workers ignore the emotional situation of colleagues and only tend to help each other when there is only work related obstacles. 42.1% responded never to “coworkers comfort me out when things get demanding”. Emotional burnout due to coworkers is quite high in this bank which is almost 47.7%.

On the other hand, stress level has increased for 78.90% respondents after working in the particular branch. The one of the common reasons of employee burnout is frustration. Here we have found that 57.90% employees are frustrated for the work environment. Job pressure has also affected their sleeping habits and the positive respond to this was 68.40%.

The last variable in the burnout section was role overload. This has a negative variable relation in terms of job satisfaction. 47.4% responded to have excessive work load always and even in their off days. Among the whole sample size 57.90% have responded that their work pressure is affecting their other relations in life and 31.6% responded partially affecting relations. This heavy work load is making them physically exhausted. 57.90% responded they always feel tired during the day due to work load.

Finally the decision line questions portrays the original scenario. Almost 79% employees want to change the Branch and 73.70% employees will shift the Bank if they get proper opportunity. But only 10.50% people would like to change the career from Banking Sector. The other will remain in banking sector.

DISCUSSION

The result we got from the observation showed that the average values of the performance, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction became lower as percentage of the burnout increases and eventually intention to leave become prominent. As per our interview and discussion we came to know that as it is the first generation bank they are concerned with performance more than the employees. According to the University of Michigan there are two types of leader behavior:

• Employee-oriented – they emphasize interpersonal relationships by taking a personal interest in the needs of employees
• Production-oriented – they emphasize the technical or task aspects of the job, focusing on accomplishing the group’s tasks.

The National Bank Limited use the second behavior overall. The higher authority emphasize on the task aspect and so it is also conveying its way down. We also observed that when the problem is related to work co-workers tend to help each other but other than that they try to avoid. But this approach is making employee burnout most as they are not feeling connected. Emotions cannot be taken and keep out from office so there will be positive and negative effect of that whether they try to minimize the Emotion factor or not.

The employees who are more dissatisfied with co-worker and work load they want to shift branch and Bank more. Even though they are willing to be in the Bank but in near future they might change Bank. According to Keaveney and Nelson (1993), intrinsically motivated employees are in a better position to tackle the problems arising in the environment. Intrinsically motivated officer may still feel burnout but the former does not let the latter affect his performance. The results also demonstrated the positive relationship between the motivation, satisfaction and performance of employees. (Keaveney and Nelson, 1993)

RECOMMENDATIONS

Employer needs to make sure that employees are being heard. Bank could hire a team of 2 psychologists to engage with the whole office, so that employees can talk to them and mentally feel relaxed.

Organization should make sure of a professional as well as fair environment. Unfairness causes burnout quicker than anything else. Pay inequality, random promotions, capricious recognition—all of these things can create animosity or a sense of despair in an employee. They’re made worse by the fact that, in most cases, the employee must bottle up their feelings of injustice.

Making workplace challenging for employees so that they don’t get bored. Empowering employees have always been helpful reducing burnout. Challenging your team members, stoking their passion for the company’s vision, giving them clear opportunities for advancement.

Build a positive work environment for your employees. Providing goodies, having lunch-hour parties, or giving half-days off before a holiday can all boost morale and prevent employee burnout.

Recognition is very important. Every employee wants to feel needed. An unexpected pat on the back or recognition in front of peers for a job well done can be a tremendous ego boost and go far toward stemming the onset of a burnout.

CONCLUSION

Burnout doesn’t simply result from working too many hours in a high-demand environment. Rather, it is a multidimensional response with many complex causes. Low Level sense of control over events and openness to change are associated with higher burnout scores. Burnout is higher among individuals who have an external locus of control. Burned-out individuals cope with stressful events in a passive, defensive way. In any organization not only in bank but also in any other sector it is the role of the supervisor of that individual as well as the HR Department to help maintain the mental peace and productivity of each and every employee. When any employee is thinking of leaving the organization it is the responsibility not to stop him or her but to find out why she or he is leaving the organization at all. Throughout our paper we have discussed why this happens what are the causes behind burnout, how can we prevent burnout and moreover how can we make the organization or Bank a better place to work. In many organization the rate is very high but if the recommendations are followed and the policies are maintained, burnout can be controlled in a systematic manner.