Faking it leads to burnout

PHILADELPHIA - Faking your feelings at work, especially if your boss pressures you to do it, is an important factor in burnout, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania.

Call-centre employees were more likely to feel "emotionally exhausted" - a major component of burnout - if their supervisors stressed strict rules of telephone behaviour, such as expecting workers to be nice no matter how rude the caller. While good phone manners are important, companies can pay a high price for requiring perfection. Emotional exhaustion was "very, very strongly related" to turnover, absenteeism, performance problems and loafing, said Steffanie Wilk, one of the authors of the study, which was published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Wilk and Lisa Moynihan of the London Business School surveyed 940 supervisors and 1236 workers in a variety of different call centres within a large telecom company.

Not only are workers expected to calm down cantankerous callers, which often involves suppressing negative feelings, but they are supposed to end calls on a happy note, maybe even with a sale. That often requires faking positive feelings.

What she and Moynihan noticed was that these workers, who faced similar work demands, had varied emotional reactions. "What really struck us were these pockets of happy and pockets of very sad," Wilk said. Based on talks with employees, she suspected that intrusive supervision was worsening stress inherent in the job.

Workers who were happiest had bosses who gave them some leeway: They say "if someone's really cussing you out, I'm not going to come down on you if you just cut them off."

In the survey, employees whose supervisors placed the highest priority on good interpersonal skills felt the most emotionally exhausted.

- NZPA