Work engagement and occupational burnout: Its relation to organizational socialization and psychological resilience

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the levels of work engagement in organizations located in Mexico City using standardized tests, and to determine its relationship with the occurrence of occupational burnout (OB), organizational socialization (OS), and psychological resilience. To a sample of 1110 employees, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, the Organizational Socialization Inventory, the Occupational Burnout Scale, and the Mexican Resilience Scale were applied. A path analysis with structural equation modeling was carried out to determine the causal relationship between the different variables, specifically, we were interested to see if OS and resilience influence the levels of work engagement. Indeed, our model showed a good fit to the data and suggested that SO and resilience positively affected work engagement. On the contrary, all these measurements were diminished in OB cases, suggesting that work engagement casually decreased the probability of developing OB. These findings can be used to design effective interventions to prevent OB and promote positive behaviors such as work engagement.

Resumen

El objetivo de este estudio fue evaluar los niveles de engagement en el trabajo en las organizaciones ubicadas en la Ciudad de México, usando pruebas estandarizadas, para determinar su relación con la ocurrencia del síndrome de desgaste ocupacional (SDO), la socialización organizacional (SO), y la resiliencia psicológica. A una muestra de 1110 empleados se le aplicaron: el Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, el Inventario de Socialización Organizacional, la Escala de Desgaste Ocupacional, y la Escala de Resiliencia Mexicana. El análisis de trayectorias mediante ecuaciones estructurales tuvo buen ajuste al modelo y arrojó relaciones causales entre las diferentes variables, específicamente, estábamos interesados en ver si la SO y la Resiliencia influyen en la ocurrencia del engagement. El modelo mostró un buen ajuste a los datos y sugirió que la SO y la resiliencia afectan positivamente al engagement en el trabajo. Por el contrario, todas estas mediciones fueron disminuidas en los casos de SDO, confirmando también que el engagement se comporta en forma positiva y opuesta al SDO. Estos hallazgos pueden ser utilizados para diseñar intervenciones efectivas para prevenir el SDO y promover comportamientos positivos como el engagement.

1

Introduction

During long time, clinical psychology to a great extent focused on studying people with behavioral dysfunctions (Caballo, Buela-Casal, & Carrobles, 1995). Similarly, organizational psychology and, specifically, the human resources sector have centered their attention on the “sick employees” in an effort to reduce costs associated to absenteeism and staff turnover. Hence, research in occupational health has focused mainly on employee's illness (Peiró & Tetrick, 2011). Unfortunately, this contributed to a partial overlook of the phenomena because areas of study related to the employee's quality of life and well-being were often neglected.

For instance, Salanova (2008) made a literature review of papers published on work relatedness illnesses between 1907 and 2007. They found that around seventy-eight thousand articles were related to stress, about forty-five thousand related to depression, twenty-five thousand related to anxiety, and only fewer than three thousand dealt with occupational burnout (OB). In contrast, they found only fourteen thousand articles related to job satisfaction, seven thousand related to wellbeing, a thousand related to happiness, and one thousand five hundred related to engagement.

The advent of research studies on Positive Occupational Health Psychology (POHP) has sparked interest on positive organizational approaches which center on fostering favorable working conditions (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008; Baker, Rodriguez-Muñoz, & Derks, 2012). Nevertheless, publications in the area of organizational psychology continue to address questions related more to illness and dysfunction and less related to health and well-being.

From a positive stance, our globalized context endowed with constant and accelerated change has forced organizations to rethink more and more their needs. It becomes evident that if organizations want psychologically healthy collaborators, they are required to provide the working conditions that facilitate world class competence. There are five essential characteristics for the positive management of employees: self-efficacy, hope, optimism, resilience, and engagement (Salanova, 2008). For this study, we only measured the variables of engagement and resilience because the standardized instruments for the Mexican population already existed, while for the other three variables the standardization for the Mexican population is still lacking.

Work engagement has been defined as a positive psychological state within the labor environment composed of three dimensions: vigor, dedication, and absorption. Vigor is characterized by high levels of energy while working as well as willingness to invest even more effort on it. Dedication is referred as the sense of being strongly involved in one's work, and experiencing high levels of meaning and enthusiasm. Absorption consists on being fully concentrated and engrossed in one's work (Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, & Bakker, 2002).

It has been found that work engagement positively correlate with similar constructs such as organizational commitment, intra- and inter-role behavior, type A behavior, and addiction to work. Engaged workers are reported to enjoy better physical and mental health (Schaufeli, Taris, & Van Rehen, 2008). Work engagement is essential to contemporary organizations given the countless challenges ahead of them, specially, because employee's attitudes are a key factor to improve organization performance, productivity, staff retention, financial performance, and even shareholder's return (Bates, 2004; Baumruk, 2004; Richman, 2006; Schaufli & Salanova, 2007). Another positive characteristic of positive employees is resilience, which is considered to be the positive psychological capacity of overcoming adversities or conflicts (Luthans, 2002). A resilient individual behaves as a socially competent person that satisfies optimally the need of affection, respect, and social life; in turn, handles power better, achieves goals, makes better decisions and can easily procure a happy, productive, and healthy life (Salgado, 2005). No doubt that resilience is a necessary capacity on the organizational setting as conditions such as globalization, economic aperture, and increased competitiveness augment stress at work, ultimately affecting employee's health.

Another variable of importance to POHP is organizational socialization (OS), frequently known in corporate settings as onboarding, which refers to the learning process through which new employees assimilate the knowledge, skills, behaviors, norms, and values to become effective organizational members (Taormina, 2004). OS is composed of four domains: 1) training, the process by which each employee develops the necessary skills to carry out the specific job; 2) understanding, the explicit knowledge about the job, other coworkers, and the organizational culture; 3) co-worker support, to promote the development of a social network at work; and 4) future prospects, which provides an outline of future rewards as the employee advances its career in the organization.

Applying OS leads to a number of crucial benefits for the organization such as loyalty among collaborators, greater work commitment, increased productivity, and permanence in the organization (Villavicencio, 2014). It has been found a relationship between the domains of OS (training, understanding, co-worker support, and future prospects) and engagement, specifically, it has been reported a positive correlation between the application of OS and high levels of work engagement among employees (Afsanepurak, Norouzi, Seyfari, & Mohamadali, 2012; Lisbona, Palací, & Morales, 2009). Given that work engagement seems to have an impact on the employee general well being, the work setting becomes a critical space to study and promote positive variables within the POHP framework.

Currently, Mexican workers are often exposed to unfavorable working conditions causing behavioral and physiological alterations such as chronic stress that can lead to the emergence of occupational burnout (OB). Essentially, burnout is a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. In the work setting, OB impairs the employee physical and mental health, they often report feeling exhausted and unable to cope with the work pressure and obstacles (Gil-Monte, 2005). According to Maslach (1993), there are three dimensions that composed OB sindrome: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished sense of personal accomplishment or dissatisfaction.

The occurrence of OB represents significant losses in productivity due to diminished capacity of employees to be functional at work, low commitment with the organization, absenteeism, staff turnover, personal conflicts, and low performance (Maslach & Leiter, 2008; Schaufeli & Enzmann, 1998). Not only OB, but also psychological stress, work addiction, and psychological work harassment may be considered risk factors that can potentially contaminate the organization environment preventing the employee's development. In the last decades, organizations had been forced to cope with drastic changes and transformations as an effect of industrialization, advances in technology, and globalization; the need to be efficient and competitive brought substantial restructuring on working policies, not always in favor of the employee's well being. Mexico has not been exempted from this situation; as a consequence, it is common to find OB within Mexican organizations. Needless to say, this represents an important loss of resources as not only productivity is affected, but also OB has been suggested to lead to lack of motivation, physical, emotional, and behavioral alterations, and increased proneness to work accidents, potentially affecting other employees. Currently, there is few quantitative data that confirms this conclusion and not at all data analyzed with structural equation modeling. The social cost associated to OB is reflected partially in the monetary component and it is estimated that the costs exceed the budgeted amount assigned to public health institutions and universities (Uribe-Prado, 2008).

Presently, it is estimated that Mexicans work annually 500 hours more than workers in other countries, although this a relevant difference, the majority of Mexican workers receive only six days of vacations a year, much less than other countries members of the OCDE. This leaves Mexican workers immerse in a setting prone to illness, with long working hours, inflexible working schedules, long commutes, short vacation period, low salaries, and increased pressure to improve performance. Not only the organizations work out strategies to demand more from their employees, the employees themselves enforce this working culture, by looking down on coworkers that refuse to work extra hours or adapt to demanding working conditions. Furthermore, organizations rarely provide positive feedback or recognition to their employees, inducing the appraisal of inequality, incompatibility between the personal and the organizational values, and lack of autonomy to solve problems. All this can affect importantly employee health, unsurprisingly, the prevalence of OB has dramatically increased in the last years, becoming now a national health problem (Villavicencio, 2014).

In the literature exists two approaches to study work engagement and OB. The first approach proposes that these two variables are opposites in a continuum, where OB is the negative extreme and work engagement the positive extreme (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). As a consequence, also the domains of both variables are paired as opposite in a continuum (e.g. vigor vs. exhaustion). The second approach argues that both variables are not necessarily mutually exclusive and opposites in a continuum since workers with OB may also have high levels of engagement. Although this is a feasible assumption, studies have found that the domains in work engagement; vigor and dedication, have a negative correlation with other two domains in OB; exhaustion and cynism (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Therefore, frequently it is assumed that work engagement is negative related to OB, in other words, work engagement decreases the probability of developing OB for the employee.

Importantly, organizations have to offer the optimal conditions for work engagement to emerge. It has been shown that there is a positive correlation between onboarding or OS and work engagement, suggesting that organizations could increase their levels of employee engagement with the correct application of the onboarding process. Finally, work engagement has been linked as well to personal characteristics such as resilience, organizations could facilitate the process of identifying personal strengths and competences to be able to cope effectively with obstacles and achieve better performance.

The aim of this study is to explore the levels of work engagement and OB among employees of organizations located on Mexico City. Further, we seek to identify what is the relationship among the different variables, specifically, we want to investigate if OS and resilience have a causal relationship with work engagement. To this end, we measured the different psychological constructs with standardized tests adapted to the Mexican population (Villavicencio, Jurado, & Aguilar, 2014), and analyzed with structural equation modeling using path analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first time a study investigates the relationship between work engagement, OB, OS, and resilience using a Mexican sample.

2

Method

The data from a sample of Mexican workers was analyzed at a descriptive and correlational level (Kerlinger & Lee, 2002). To explore the relationship between the variables, we ran multivariate statistics with structural equation modeling (Ruiz, Pardo, & San Martin, 2010).

3

Participants

A sample of 1110 employees from public and private organizations located in Mexico City were drawn through the method of accidental quota sampling. The final dataset was composed of 631 male workers (56.8%) and 479 female workers (43.2%) between the ages of 18 and 66 years old (=36 años). More than half of the sample had an undergraduate degree (38.1%) or completed high school (28.7%). The most common working position was at the operational level (63.2%) followed by the coordination level (14.7%).

4

Psychological Instruments

The psychometric battery included the following four instruments:

• 1.

  The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, UWES, (Schaufeli, Bakker, & Salanova, 2006) adapted for the Mexican population by Villavicencio et al. (2014). It is composed of 12 items measuring 3 dimensions of work engagement (vigor, dedication, and absorption) with a Likert scale (1 = never to 7 = always), and reliability of .95. The confirmatory factorial analysis had a good fit for the three factors, corresponding to the three domains of the psychological construct (X²= 276.63, df= 51, p< .001, RMSEA= .07, CFI= .97, NFI= .96, RFI= .95, IFI= .97, TLI= .96).

• 2.

  The Organizational Socialization Inventory, OSI (Taormina, 1994), in its Mexican version by Villavicencio et al. (2014) composed of 17 items with a Likert scale format (from 1 = completely false to 5 = completely true), and reliability of. 94. The confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the four domains: training, understanding, co-worker support, and future prospects, with a good fit (X² = 492 44, df= 98, p < .001, RMSEA = .06, CFI = .95, AGFI = .93, NFI = .94, RFI = .93, IFI = .95, TLI = .94).

• 3.

  The Occupational Burnout Scale, OBS (Uribe et al., 2010), measures three factors (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment) with a reliability of .92. For this study, we used an adapted version with 11 items (see for details, Villavicencio, 2014). The chi-square statistic indicated goodness-of-fit for this version (X²= 63.40 gl= 41, p= .014, RMSEA= .022, CFI= .99, NFI= .97, RFI= .96, IFI= .99, TLI = .98).

• 4.

  The Mexican Resilience Scale, RESI-M, (Palomar- Lever & González-Valdez, 2010) has 43 items with a 4 answer options measures five factors (strength and self-confidence, social competence, family support, social support and structure) with reliability of .93.

• 5.

  In addition, all participants signed an informed consent detailing the objectives and the procedures of the study as well as guaranteeing their free participations in the research.

5

Procedure

Workers from public and private organizations in Mexico City were invited to participate in the study. The psychological tests were filled during working hours from 9:00 to 18:00 hours. To each participant, the purpose of the investigation and the voluntary nature of participation was explained through the informed consent form. This form guaranteed confidentiality and their right to leave the study if they wished, it also contained details about the benefits and risks of this research. A member of the research team was always present during the test application to answer questions, and verify that the instrument was answered properly. At the end, we thanked them for their participation, provided them with a brief explanation of the research, and informed them that no private information will ever be disclosed as their participation was anonymous.

6

Results

First we performed a descriptive level analysis of the data to determine the frequencies and percentages of our variables of interest. The levels for OB (according to Leiter's model, 1991) were distributed in our sample in the following way: 27.8% of the total sample fell in phase 4 (very high OB: “burnout”), followed by a 35.6% in phase 3 (high: “endangered”), a 35.1% in phase 2 (regular: “normal”) and only a 1.5% in phase 1 (low: “healthy”). The levels of the engagement were organized according to the normative table prepared by Villavicencio (2014). They showed that 65.7% had very high levels of engagement, 22.1% high level, 10.1% middle level, and 2.1% low level.

Correlational analyses were performed to measure the level of association between the sociodemographic variables and the dependent variables – OB dimensions, work engagement, resilience and OS in workers. Most of the correlations had coefficients lower than 0.35, hence, were not included in the results.

A bivariate Pearson correlation revealed the relationship between the dimensions of our four variables. Specifically, the OB factor, dissatisfaction, negatively correlated with the three factors of engagement: vigor, r = -.353, 95% CI [-0.40, -0.30], Fisher's Zr = .36; dedication, r = -.437, 95% CI [-0.48, -0.38], Fisher's Zr = -.46; and absorption r = -.264, 95% CI [0.2084, 0.3179], Fisher's Zr = -.2704, with a significance level of p < .001. Also, it stood out the positive correlation between OS and work engagement (r =. 498, 95% CI [0.45, -0.54], Fisher's Zr = 0.54) with a significance of p < .001 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Correlation matrix with dimensions and total scores for occupational burnout, work engagement, resilience and organizational socialization.

		Occupational Burnout		Engagement				Resilience
		Dissatisfaction	Total	Vigor	Dedication	Absorption	Total	Total
Engagement	Vigor	-.353^**
	Dedication	-.437^**
	Absorption	-.264^**
	Total		-.268^**
Organizational Socialization	Training			.397^**	.305^**	.306^**
	Understanding	-.301^**		.483^**	.381^**	.313^**
	Co-worker support				.332^**
	Future prospects	-.362^**		.506^**	.326^**	.334^**
	Total		-.257^**				.498^**	.248^**
Resilience	Total		-.183^**				.240^**

**

Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level.

To know the relationship between the dependent and independent variables, we identified the significant correlations and fed them into a linear regression model with the enter method (see Table 2). The latter was done in order to know whether the independent variables explained part of the variance observed in the dependent variables (OB and work engagement). For work engagement, we found that the multiple correlation coefficient was R =.58 (F = 114.72, p < .001); and for OB was R = .41 (F = 30.84, p < .001). In both cases, the variables were linearly related and work engagement was the variable that explained the greatest percentage of the variance.

Table 2.

Linear regression of dependent variables (OB and Work Engagement).

Dimensions	OB
	B	Beta	t
Vigor	-1.33^***	-.28	-7.64
Absorption	.83^***	.14	3.93
Comprensión	-1.06^**	-.10	-2.75
Co-worker support	.93^**	.10	3.06
Future prospects	-1.27^***	-.18	-4.66
Family support	-1.17^**	-.14	-3.47
Social support	.97^*	.09	2.49
Dimensions	ENG
	B	Beta	t
Emotional exhaustion	.39^***	.19	6.57
Dissatisfaction	-.34^***	-.31	-10.22
Understanding	1.01^***	.23	7.71
Future prospects	.58^***	.19	5.67
Structure	.49^***	.11	4.46

***

p<.001

**

p<.01

*

p<.05

We conducted a path analysis using structural equations with our four variables: engagement, OB, resilience, and OS. The model showed goodnessof- fit as indicated by the different indices: X² = 002 df = 1, p =. 966, RMSEA =. 000, CFI =. 99, NFI =. 99, RFI =. 99, IFI =. 99, TLI =.99 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Final structural model of the causal relationship between the work engagement and occupational burnout, resilience, and organizational socialization.

7

Discussion and Conclusion

The results of this study allow us to conclude that 27.8% of the surveyed workers were burnout, 35.6% were endangered, 35.1% with moderate levels of OB, and only 1.5% could be considered healthy. This situation is striking because if workers in phases 2 and 3 went untreated, they could dramatically increase the number of workers with OB in phase 4.

The most dangerous feature of OB is that it tends to go unnoticed, usually detected until late stages, causing serious physical, emotional and behavioral impairments in the worker. Burnout employees no longer enjoy their work, begin to lower their productivity, miss more working days, and make more errors. When it comes to employees in the area of personal services, these errors may have significant consequences on others. In reality, it might be impossible to prevent all cases of physical and mental exhaustion in the workspace, however, it is key to detect OB on time and facilitate to the employees a shift in activities or even a transition to another job.

OB emerges from the work setting, although interpersonal variables may facilitate or inhibit the onset of OB, the organizational variables trigger the syndrome. This aspect has a lot of relevance because the Mexican organizational culture encourages the high rates of OB through a myriad of unfavorable working conditions that seek to improve productivity at the expense of the employee well being. The most frequent complains among workers include the excessive workload for the time allotted, the lack of support from supervisors, little or no recognition, and lack of collaboration.

Similarly, high levels of engagement were found in more than half of the sample (65.7%) followed by a medium level (22.1%). These results are encouraging, since engagement brings benefits to the employees and the organization such as more work satisfaction, organizational commitment, productivity, staff retention, better performance, and more healthy individuals (Endres & Mancheño Smoak, 2008; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2010).

Our data was consistant with the literature and showed that engaged workers typically have low levels of OB (Maslach et al., 2001; Schaufeli, Martinez, Marques-Pinto, Salanova, & Bakker, 2002; Montgomery, Peeters, Schaufeli, & Den Ouden, 2003; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). Particularly, the factor dissatisfaction in OB seemed to negatively influence engagement, in other words, high levels of dissatisfaction correlates with low levels of engagement.

Also, dissatisfaction influences negatively the levels of OS, in particular on the dimensions of understanding and future prospects, which seems to indicate that employees with high levels of dissatisfaction (SDO) do not acquire sufficient knowledge about their job, co-workers, and organizational culture, nor achieve clarity on the rewards linked to their performance. When good performance goes uncompensated, the behavior may be discontinued and the opportunity to take advantage of the employee's motivation is lost. For this reason, it is recommended that organizations use monetary bonuses, promotions, and social rewards not only to motivate employees and increase their commitment to work but also to help them visualize a rewarding future within the organization. Favorable perceptions and attitudes can help reduce the incidence of OB and lead to better work performance.

Also consistent with the literature, we found a positive correlation between work engagement and OS (Lisbona, et al., 2009; Taormina, 1997). Empirical research has reported that a good adjustment to organization is usually facilitated by the implementation of a socialization process, the former leads to high levels of job satisfaction and engagement. It may also lead to the development of an effective career within the organization accompanied of low levels of stress (Afsanepurak, et al., 2012). In light of these results, organizations must rethink their need to implement these processes of socialization to obtain the benefits mentioned before.

Moreover, we found a positive relationship between work engagement and resilience, this means that resilience favors the emergence of engagement. An organization composed of resilient workers is better suited for our globalized context because they are more likely to overcome, analyze, and react appropriately against the demands of the environment, giving rise to superior performance. In these organizations, attention to the employees’ psychological and physical state is a priority which means that they also value and take into account their contributions. Additionally, these organizations are more democratic companies, putting emphasis in the collective good, creativity, transparency in the communication process, and a participative decision-making process.

The obtained model confirms the causal relationship between the variable engagement and the other variables of the study. We found that work engagement has an inverse correlation with OB, at greater levels of engagement lesser is the level of OB, a finding that is consistent with the literature (Gonzalez-Roma, Schaufeli, Bakker, & Lloret, 2006).

It is worth noting the causal relationship between engagement and OS, as it was mentioned before, if the organization provides clear and precise information about the activities related to the job, the organizational culture, the operational processes, and the incentive program; employees are more likely to develop high levels of work engagement. The opposite is also true, in the absence of OS is more likely to have low levels of engagement, and thereby, a work environment conducive to OB.

Finally, resilience also showed a causal relationship with work engagement to a lesser extent. It suggests that resilient workers are more social competent, achieve more their business goals, optimal levels of productivity, and better quality of life. Despite the low weight of this factor (.20), resilience also has a relationship to OS which suggests that resilient individuals manage to detect and take advantage of positive work environments and choose them as favorite options to develop a long-term career.

The obtained model shows a crucial influence on the variable engagement, making this psychological construct a central concept for POHP. There is enough empirical evidence to provide a set of guidelines to help design and implement new management strategies in the area of human resources. This new approach can help improve the health, motivation, safety, and well-being of workers. Undoubtedly, the structure and functioning of the workplace define the way in which employees interact with each other and how they carry out their job. Therefore, it becomes important to bridge the gap between the work environment and the employee personal and professional development; not only the organizations will reduce the incidence of OB, but also they will profit from the effective use of all their human resource.

To reduce the prevalence of OB, the organizations are required to promote positive behaviors as work engagement instead of putting emphasis on reducing the symptoms of sick employees. We propose a model of intervention that promotes opportunities for professional development, work recognition, quality of life, a positive work environment, security, work-life balance, and an attractive incentive program.

In general, healthy workers are more likely to develop high levels of engagement allowing them to carry positive feelings and experiences from work to home and vice versa, manage better their time and resources, and spread this attitude to other co-workers; benefiting ultimately the whole organization and their members (Bakker, Salanova, Schaufeli, & Llorens, 2003; Salanova, Llorens, Cifre, Martinez & Schaufeli, 2003).

The pervasive organizational culture in Mexico forces employees to work for long hours and accept jobs with little security and no health benefits. Under this circumstance, it seems impossible to achieve a healthy and balanced lifestyle. However, we found some organizations that worried about their employees and enable them to accomplish a balance between their personal and professional life. These organizations considered the human talent their most precious asset and made efforts to stimulate healthy work environments. They achieved this by promoting healthy habits with a high level of commitment. Positive reactions to these kind of policies is reflected in the high level of employee commitment with their work and collaborators, in summary, enabling a virtuous cycle.

It becomes increasingly necessary to inform those organizations that have not implemented programs that promote healthy life styles, of their potential waste in talent and productivity. Organizations with sick members are less likely to achieve high levels of performance.

For future research, we recommend to incorporate data from the other three characteristics of the POHP approach: self-efficacy, hope, and optimism. To this end, first, we need to test the validity and reliability of the instruments for the Mexican population to be able to collect data.