The impact of role stressors and work overload on job burnout

Abstract

The phenomenon of job burnout has had a focus on traditional helping professions (e.g., nurses, doctors, lawyers, teachers). However, today, newer forms of service organisations like call centres have surfaced and provided new meaning to the way work is structured and customer service provided. Telephone call centres provide quality and efficient service in the most cost-effective way possible by, inter alia, using customer service representatives (CSRs) to attend to clients’ each and every need. Call centres, however, pose distinct work demands and stress and burnout have been widely acknowledged. However, there is a lack of empirical investigation in this area which prompted us to examine job burnout in the context of call centres in India. A quantitative study was conducted taking eight call centres located in two major cities of India with a total sample size of 303 CSRs. Basically, the effect of role stressors and work overload on job burnout was studied using two multivariate techniques. The results show that role conflict and work overload are significantly and positively related to burnout while role ambiguity has a significant but inverse relationship. Implications of the proposed research are discussed along with scope for future research.