17 - Do Teachers Burn Out More Easily? A Comparison of Teachers with Other Social Professions on Work Stress and Burnout Symptoms

Summary

It is well known that teachers have a demanding and in many cases stressful job. Work overload (Van Ginkel, 1987), lack of autonomy (Jackson, Schwab, and Schuler, 1986), disrespect, inattentiveness and low sociability with pupils (Friedman, 1995d), lack of support from colleagues and management (Brissie, Hoover-Dempsey, and Bassler, 1988), and loss of status of the teaching profession (Friesen and Sarros, 1989) are only a few examples of the stressors that teachers have to cope with.

These and other work-stressors appear to manifest themselves in teachers as physical and psychological problems. Premature retirement is the fate of the greater number of Dutch teachers; teachers still active in their job show high rates of sick leave in comparison to workers in many other professions, especially teachers older than fifty (Van Ginkel, 1987). Because of the thoroughly interpersonal character of the teaching job (which demands from the teacher the ability to manage extensive and often intensive contacts with pupils), teachers are also vulnerable to the common burden of the so-called social professions (i.e., jobs characterized by many interactions with other people that place high demands on the social skills of their professionals): burnout (e.g., Maslach, 1982a).

Burnout among teachers was the focal topic of the study reported here, in which a sample of about one thousand teachers is compared with members of other social professions on burnout symptoms and, in an attempt to explain the obtained differences in burnout, on work stressors and social support.