Assessment of the feeling of burnout of border officers at Lisbon airport: Statistical contributions

Abstract

Border officers of Lisbon airport (Portugal) are, as professionals from other sectors of activity, exposed to various psychosocial stressors in their workplace. Thus, monitoring the professionals of this security service is important to understand their situation, because working under conditions of prolonged excessive stress (distress) can lead to burnout syndrome, with negative consequences for workers, organization and economy. In this study a Portuguese version of the Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure (SMBM), validated internationally, was used in a survey to assess the “feeling of burnout” of those workers. The SMBM has 14 questions that correspond to manifest variables expressed in a Likert-type scale of 7 categories, which operationalize the latent variables: emotional exhaustion, cognitive fatigue (or weariness) and physical fatigue, considered three facets of burnout. Based on a sample, some descriptive statistics were obtained, and to compare the latent variables mentioned in two groups of workers, created by the dichotomous variable years of service (A: maximum 2 years and B: more than 2 years), a parametric test was applied, with and without outliers. The means of the scores of the three latent variables are less than 5 and the same happens with the latent variable feeling of burnout (which may be indicative of the absence of problems in this domain). In the comparison of groups A and B, for a significance level of 5%, only when considering the results with the full dataset (i.e. with outliers) were identified statistically significant differences were identified in the means of the scores of latent variables emotional exhaustion and feeling of burnout.