avatarRichard K. Yu

Summary

The article discusses the potential of creative control as a resource to mitigate employee burnout, particularly for highly engaged employees, by aligning job roles with personal fulfillment and allowing self-regulation of job resources.

Abstract

The article "Creative Control As a Resource to Mitigate Employee Burnout" explores the paradoxical relationship between high employee engagement and burnout, suggesting that traditional wellness initiatives may not be as effective as previously thought. It references the Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) model, which posits that job demands must be balanced with adequate resources to prevent burnout. The authors propose that by granting employees greater creative control, organizations can enhance job resources, enabling employees to tailor their roles to their individual sense of fulfillment and self-regulate their workload. This approach, termed "smart engagement," aims to maintain enthusiasm and productivity without leading to burnout. The article also cites a study by Blom et al. (2016) that supports the idea that increased control can reduce the impact of job demands on burnout, particularly among male managers.

Opinions

  • Traditional health and wellness initiatives are deemed less effective in reducing burnout for employees with high job demands.
  • The authors express skepticism about the long-term benefits of stretch goals and challenges due to their potential high cost in terms of employee well-being.
  • Increased job demands should be counterbalanced with increased resources, such as empathy, or by lowering job demands to combat burnout.
  • Creative control is presented as a method to increase job resources and align with employees' personal senses of fulfillment, thereby potentially reducing burnout.
  • The effectiveness of creative control in mitigating burnout may vary depending on workplace hierarchy and gender, as indicated by the study of Blom et al. (2016).

Creative Control As a Resource to Mitigate Employee Burnout

Possible paths forward to address the problem of employee burnout.

Photo by Beata Ratuszniak on Unsplash

Introducing greater creative control for highly engaged employees may help create smart engagement that mitigates high employee burnout.

Creative control should involve personalizing a role to fit an employee’s individual sense of fulfillment, allowing for that employee to self-regulate amount of job resources available to them and to reduce job demand at their discretion without sacrificing performance.

Premise

In a recent publication in the Harvard Business Review, authors Emma Seppala and Julia Moeller review the troubling idea that companies may be at risk of losing competent, productive employees due to the relationship between high engagement and burnout.

Seppala and Moeller term this group of workers the engaged-exhausted group and they comment on the paradoxical nature of these seemingly model workers including the ideas that:

  • Passion for their work dampened by contradictory and negative feelings of stress and frustration.
  • Higher turnover rates, despite showing desirable behaviors such as interest in skill acquisition, in comparison to even workers that report higher burnout and low engagement.

These conclusions appear to mainly summarize the findings from another study conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

So, the central question that Seppala and Moeller appear to explore hinges around how companies, organizations, and leaders can extract the benefits of high engagement without sacrificing the health of their employees — as demonstrated by various studies they cite relating high engagement to burnout.

Importantly, most of the research that Seppala and Moeller cite relates to the Job Demand-Resources, or JD-R model, which tries to explain occupational health outcomes and trends through the counterbalance of job demands and resources.

One of the seminal papers on the JD-R model by Demerouti et al. (2001) explains this balance more clearly:

“Job demands are primarily related to the exhaustion component of burnout, whereas (lack of) job resources are primarily related to disengagement” (p. 499).

Outlining ways to optimize job resources while also scaling and creating value from job demands characterizes the main idea behind the applications of the JD-R model in recent literature.

Moreover, Seppala and Moeller seem to note, in the context of this model, that the goal of creating engagement that does not heighten burnout in tandem involves, “…[providing] employees with the resources they need to do their job well, feel good about their work, and recover from work stressors experienced through work.”

The contentious part is how this is done by companies. They offer the viewpoint that the traditional health initiatives are less efficacious in reducing burnout for employees with high job demand, and they express less optimism for:

  • Wellness initiatives (“Our data suggests that while wellness initiatives can be helpful, a much bigger lever is the work itself.”)
  • Stretch goals or challenges (“While that can be true, we too often forget that high challenges tend to come at high cost…”)

(Seppala & Moeller, 2018).

Finally, it’s concluded that increased demands need to be balanced with increased resources (i.e. greater empathy) or that job demands should be lowered altogether to combat burnout.

In short, Seppala and Moeller suggest that promoting smart engagement which intends to engender “…enthusiasm, motivation and productivity, without the burnout,” and conscientious partitioning of emotional resources to employees during high-stress events like keynote addresses or conferences exist as a path to lessen burnout while retaining engagement and productivity.

Why Creative Control Follows From Smart Engagement

Like Seppala and Moeller suggest, taking a further step towards solving the problem of the coincidence of high engagement, motivation, and an eventual a high burnout rate of talented employees involves introducing a novel approach to engagement.

Giving employees greater creative control is a possible route to increasing job resources while also accounting for increased job demands.

One study published in The International Journal of Workplace Health Management by Blom et al. (2016) examined 5,510 individuals in complete same-sex twin pairs in the context of the Demand-Control-Support (DCS) model, and it lends some credence to the idea.

Significantly, Blom et al. (2016) reported several key ideas relating to the manifestation of burnout and resilience against burnout.

  • For context, “The aim of the study was to investigate the impact of demands, control, support on burnout in female and male managers and non-managers, also while controlling for familial influences.”
  • Exposure to more demand does not lead to more burnout for managers in comparison to non-managers.
  • “The present study show[ed] a significantly higher control in managers compared to non-managers and a significant interaction effect of demands and control in male managers, meaning that control reduces the impact of demands on burnout in the group of male managers…” (p. 117).
  • “Interestingly, this buffering effect of control was not found in female managers” (p.117).

Therefore, control — especially creative control — may stand as a new solution to the issue of how employers and companies can reduce burnout.

A barrier to this is qualifying creative control, as Blom et al. (2016) point out that this resistance to burnout from higher control possesses dependencies on workplace hierarchy and gender.

By implementing measures to determine how exactly an employee’s perceptions of their job intersects with their own senses of fulfillment, it is reasonable to conjecture that more robust job resources — through matching that sense of fulfillment with a sense of creative control — will become available and ultimately offset job demands, preventing undesirable outcomes such as in the case of Dorothea’s collapse.

References

Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512.

Moeller, J., Ivcevic, Z., White, A. E., Menges, J., & Brackett, M. A. (2018, January 25). Highly Engaged but Burned Out: Intra-Individual Profiles in the US Workforce. http://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-12-2016-0215

Victoria, B., Lennart, B., Gunnar, B., & Pia, S. (2016). Applying the demand-control-support model on burnout in managers and non-managers. International Journal Of Workplace Health Management, (1), 110. doi:10.1108/IJWHM-06–2015–0033

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Employee Engagement
Stress
Psychology
Creativity
Management
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