It Staff Burnout And Job Requirements, Work Resources Research

Job burnout was a prolonged response to chronic stressors on the job. In China, researches on job burnout had mainly concentrated on those professions that demand working with people, while professions that involve working on objects had rarely been studied. Taking IT staff as its subjects and basing on the job demands-resources model, this research explored the burnout situation in IT staff, and it also experimented the relationships between workload, work-family conflict(job demands), organizational support, decision latitude(job resources) and burnout of IT staff. The goal of this research was to provide data references for further studies, and to provide theoretical basis for the prevention of and intervention in job burnout as well.Five scales including Maslach burnout inventory-General Survey, job demands inventory, work-family conflict inventory, perceived organizational support inventory, and decision latitude inventory were used and 795 members of IT staff were assessed for this research. The burnout situation in IT staff was explored first, and then we discussed the relationships between workload, work-family conflict, organizational support, decision latitude and burnout. Lastly we built up the model of job demands, job resources and job burnout.The main findings were the following:Firstly, IT staffs'scores in burnout inventory and in emotional exhaustion, cynicism, reduced sense of personal accomplishment were between 2 and 3. But there were 24.5%,38.1%,30.7%,25.4% subjects whose score was or higher than the medium 3 in MBI inventory and the three dimensions respectively.Secondly, multifactor variant analysis showed that the main effect on different types of work was significant in job burnout as well as in emotional exhaustion and in cynicism, the communication engineering staff scored higher than the staff in other types of work; in reduced sense of personal accomplishment, there were interactions between genders, degrees and working-ages. The main effect on different types of work was significant in both workload and work-family conflict variables, the communication engineering staff scored higher than the staff in other types of work; and in perceived organizational support and decision latitude variables, the main effect on educational background was significant, the staff with bachelor's degree or above scored higher than the staff with associate degree.Thirdly, correlational analysis showed that job burnout and cynicism were positively related to workload and work-family conflict strongly, whereas they were strongly negatively related to decision latitude, and there was no significant relation between them and perceived organizational support. Emotional exhaustion was strongly positively related to workload, work-family conflict, perceived organizational support and decision latitude. Reduced personal accomplishment was strongly negatively related to workload, and was strongly positively related to perceived organizational support and decision latitude.Lastly, path analysis showed that workload and work-family conflict(job demands) influenced on emotional exhaustion, the path coefficient was 0.70 , whereas they had indirect influence on cynicism, and the path coefficient was 0.46; perceived organizational support and decision latitude (job resources) had direct influence on both cynicism and reduced personal accomplishment and the path coefficient was -0.37 and -0.39 respectively.The conclusions were as follows:First, there were a high percentage of job burnout cases in IT staff, and there was difference between different types of work.Second, job demands had direct influence on emotional exhaustion, whereas job demands had indirect influence on cynicism. Job resources had direct influence on both cynicism and reduced sense of personal accomplishment. The job demands-resources model of burnout had been verified.