Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Client Role in Staff Burn‐Out

The Client Role in Staff Burn‐Out The intense involvement with clients required of professional staff in various human service institutions includes a great deal of emotional stress, and failure to cope successfully with such stress can result in the emotional exhaustion syndrome of burn‐out, in which staff lose all feeling and concern for their clients and treat them in detached or even dehumanized ways. This paper focuses on the role that clients themselves play in staff burn‐out. Important client factors include the type and severity of the clients' problems, the prognosis of change or cure, the degree of personal relevance for the staff member of the clients' problems, the rules governing staff‐client interaction, and the clients' reactions to the staff themselves. Changes in the structure of the staff‐client interaction and changes in client expectations about staff can alleviate staff burn‐out. It should be recognized that clients can dehumanize staff just as staff can dehumanize them, and that steps to humanize the staff‐client relationship must focus on both participants in this interaction. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Social Issues Wiley

The Client Role in Staff Burn‐Out

Journal of Social Issues , Volume 34 (4) – Oct 1, 1978

Loading next page...
 
/lp/wiley/the-client-role-in-staff-burn-out-bLKMl9fHav

References (9)

Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
1978 The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
ISSN
0022-4537
eISSN
1540-4560
DOI
10.1111/j.1540-4560.1978.tb00778.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The intense involvement with clients required of professional staff in various human service institutions includes a great deal of emotional stress, and failure to cope successfully with such stress can result in the emotional exhaustion syndrome of burn‐out, in which staff lose all feeling and concern for their clients and treat them in detached or even dehumanized ways. This paper focuses on the role that clients themselves play in staff burn‐out. Important client factors include the type and severity of the clients' problems, the prognosis of change or cure, the degree of personal relevance for the staff member of the clients' problems, the rules governing staff‐client interaction, and the clients' reactions to the staff themselves. Changes in the structure of the staff‐client interaction and changes in client expectations about staff can alleviate staff burn‐out. It should be recognized that clients can dehumanize staff just as staff can dehumanize them, and that steps to humanize the staff‐client relationship must focus on both participants in this interaction.

Journal

Journal of Social IssuesWiley

Published: Oct 1, 1978

There are no references for this article.