The Mediating Effect of Organizational Trust on the Link between the Areas of Work Life and Emotional Exhaustion

Abstract

Academicians have a lot of flexibility in how they spend their time, not only in terms of hours per week, but also in how they schedule teaching, administrative, research, and publishing related activities (Siegall & Mc Donald, 2004). However, time when academic institutions were regarded as a low-stress working environment has come to pass (Chen et al., 2014). Instead, academic faculty members working at universities are faced with overloaded work schedules (Dillion & Tanner, 1995), challenging demands from diverse student populations (Byrne, 1999), and limited opportunities for promotion. At same time, they are under high pressure to improve their academic and teaching performance while also being subject to increasingly demanding criteria and standards in academic publications (Tumkaya, 2006). Such harsh organizational requirements imposed on academic staff has caused growing interest in understanding faculty members' emotional reactions to adverse work conditions and stressors. Among emotional reactions, burnout merits special attention because its resulting negative consequences are on increase at an ever accelerating rate in educational institutions. Such consequences include accelerated turnover intentions (TI), reduced quality of teaching and research, absenteeism, and detachment (e.g., Erkutlu, Chafra, & Bumin, 2011; Murat, 2003).Although a vast amount of studies conducted in educational institutions have examined burnout syndrome (Maslach, 1993), much of work has focused on helping individuals by suggesting various coping strategies (Dworkin, 2001). Schwab and Iwanicki (1982, p. 62) state that many organizations have launched programs to combat burnout without understanding what it is, why it exists, or even whom it is effecting. So, scholars start to argue that this traditional individualistic approach is inefficient in providing realistic picture of burnout and commented that the causal elements of burnout are to be seen within structure of school or structure of educational system (Dworkin, 2001, p. 70). Thus, it is of worth to adopt a wider perspective while examining academician burnout. In this case, researchers attempted to observe it through an organizational lens.Maslach and Leiter (1997) described six areas of work life (AW) in an organizational context coming together and encompassing major organizational antecedents of burnout: These areas are workload, fairness, control, community, reward, and values. Accordingly, burnout arises from mismatches between people and their work settings manifesting in six areas (Leiter & Maslach, 1999). It has been reported that burnout levels for academicians are now comparable with those of other education and service professionals (Watts & Robertson, 2011). As indicated previously, teaching staff in higher education institutions currently face increasing demands and experience high pressure to equip themselves with necessary skills to respond to demands of dynamic environment (Chen et al., 2014). When academicians do not experience a sense of wellbeing at work, they experience high levels of stress, become more dissatisfied with their job, and suffer from greater emotional exhaustion (Trent, 1997). Therefore, this study takes as its base assumption that work environment can fully account for what had previously been considered an individual syndrome of burnout (Lasalvia et al., 2009) and then explores role of perceived contextual factors on exhaustion.Although some research has focused on linkage between workplace factors in AW and burnout, by what means these factors influence burnout has not been adequately investigated. For this reason, this paper focuses on organizational trust, which simply reflect employees' willingness to be vulnerable to their organizations' actions (Paliszkiewicz, 2011), as a transmitting mechanism. Accordingly, this degree of vulnerability increases in situations where parties are interdependent to each other. …