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This edition of Keeping Up With… was written by Matthew Weirick Johnson.

Matthew Weirick Johnson is Director of Research & Instruction at the University of South Florida Libraries, Tampa campus, email: matt@mattweirick.com.

Introduction

In the past four decades, we’ve come a long way in recognizing the prevalence of burnout among librarians—from “Are Librarians Burning Out” to “The Librarians Are Not Okay.”[1] However, library leaders need to activate this recognition to develop meaningful solutions. To “help librarians develop the agency to challenge the assumptions and practices that have led to so much professional burnout,” Christina Holm, Ana Guimaraes, and Nashieli Marcano edited the book Academic Librarian Burnout: Causes and Responses, which includes 24 chapters on topics specific to academic librarians’ experiences of burnout.[2]

Burnout is an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic or prolonged workplace stress. The effects of burnout are ongoing and may be missed by library workers in early stages. The term burnout was originally popularized in the psychological literature by Herbert Freudenberger. However, the work of Christina Maslach and colleagues from the 1980s to the present, beginning with research among human services workers, has significantly informed our current understanding of and approach to burnout in research and practice.[3] Based on this research, we frequently consider three primary dimensions of burnout:

• increased emotional exhaustion
• increased depersonalization or cynicism
• reduced professional accomplishment or efficacy

Evangelia Demerouti and Arnold B. Bakker proposed a model of burnout that considers job demands in comparison to job resources, conceived of as positive aspects of the job such as autonomy.[4] When job demands are high and job resources are low, burnout becomes more common; however increasing job resources or decreasing job demands can improve workplace situations. This model may be helpful for libraries considering their own workplace situations, and the concept of job resources may resonate with library workers who are frequently asked to do more with fewer resources.

Causes

Frequently, overwork is seen as the sole cause of burnout. Some library workers might even say that they don’t think they’re burnt out because they aren’t overworked even though there are other issues with their role. In fact, some people may conflate burnout with overwork. Additionally, relative-deprivation theory explains the way that librarians might believe that they aren’t burnt out enough or more specifically that others are more burnt out than they are, so they can’t complain.[5] These misconceptions and challenges can lead library workers to ignore their own burnout. Causes of burnout can be extensive and multifaceted, including overwork but also erosion of work-life balance, micromanaging or toxic leadership, workplace bullying, low control, and role conflict or ambiguity.

For library workers in particular two key potential contributors to burnout may be low morale and vocational awe.[6] On a basic level, low morale may be thought of as feeling bad about our work while vocational awe makes us feel that the institutions we work for “are inherently good and democratic, and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this ‘good’ work.”[7] Fobazi Ettarh specifically articulates the ways in which vocational awe can be weaponized to various ends that exacerbate burnout, such as being taken advantage of by supervisors, being accused of not being passionate enough, feeling ashamed to leave a job, or feeling unable to critique your job or libraries generally.[8]

Consequences

While burnout is a psychological phenomenon, it has physical and psychological consequences. Also, while burnout is an occupational phenomenon, it originates at work but can impact various aspects of life. Several physical, psychological, occupational, and organizational consequences are outlined below:

• Physical Consequences: “hypercholesterolemia, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalization due to cardiovascular disorder, musculoskeletal pain, changes in pain experiences, prolonged fatigue, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, respiratory problems, severe injuries and mortality below the age of 45 years.”[9]
• Psychological Consequences: “insomnia, depressive symptoms, use of psychotropic and antidepressant medications, hospitalization for mental disorders and psychological ill-health symptoms.”[10]
• Occupational and Organizational Consequences: “job dissatisfaction, absenteeism, new disability pension, job demands, job resources and presenteeism.”[11]
  

Responses

Libraries and other organizations have offered a variety of responses to prevent or mitigate burnout. Some of these interventions, especially those targeted at individuals, such as wellness or mindfulness interventions, may treat symptoms but ignore the underlying causes of burnout, such as dysfunctional organizations, poor management, and role or support issues. Five potential responses are outlined below:

• Improvements to onboarding: Library workers new to an organization may struggle to learn organizational processes and culture and to understand the expectations of their roles. Interventions that target onboarding, including considering recruitment and hiring as part of the onboarding process, may help mitigate burnout for new employees.
• Unions and worker solidarity: Organized labor provides an opportunity for workers to collectively negotiate with their employers to achieve better workplaces and working conditions, to build power together, and to understand the struggles of their colleagues. Through this process, library workers can change their organizations and hold management accountable.
• Meaningful work: Building meaningful and manageable workloads for each individual employee is important for preventing burnout, and continual open dialogue between supervisors and employees is necessary for identifying issues as they arise. Honest conversations about the characteristics of one’s work and the language to use to describe those characteristics are necessary for mitigating burnout and improving engagement and satisfaction more broadly.
• Management training: Library managers and leaders may lack the necessary training to notice burnout as it creeps up and to make changes to employee’s roles to support them. Training and mentorship opportunities for library managers that address the specific challenges of managing library workers as well as librarian burnout may better prepare managers.
• Organizational culture: Reflecting on the culture of a library may provide opportunities to target root causes of burnout throughout the organization. While this may be daunting because culture is difficult to change, organizations with high turnover and burnout across the organization should consider their culture and leadership.
  

Conclusion

As we move past proving that librarians are burning out, we need to consider causes and responses, looking beyond individual actions and self-care. We need to examine the professional, organizational, and occupational causes of burnout, including those that are unique to librarianship, libraries, and library workers, and determine practical approaches for library workers and leaders to identify and ameliorate them.

Notes

[1] Anne Helen Petersen, “The Librarians Are Not Okay,” Substack newsletter, Culture Study (blog), May 1, 2022, ; David P. Fisher, “Are Librarians Burning Out?,” Journal of Librarianship 22, no. 4 (October 1990): 216–35, .

[2] Christina Holm, Ana Guimaraes, and Nashieli Marcano, eds., Academic Librarian Burnout: Causes and Responses (Chicago, Illinois: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2022). .

[3] Herbert J. Freudenberger, “Staff Burn-Out,” Journal of Social Issues 30, no. 1 (1974): 159–65, ; Christina Maslach and Susan E. Jackson, “The Measurement of Experienced Burnout,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 2, no. 2 (April 1981): 99–113, ; Christina Maslach, Wilmar B. Schaufeli, and Michael P. Leiter, “Job Burnout,” Annual Review of Psychology 52, no. 1 (February 2001): 397–422, .

[4] Evangelia Demerouti, Arnold B. Bakker, Friedhelm Nachreiner, and Wilmar B. Schaufeli, “The Job Demands-Resources Model of Burnout,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 3 (2001): 499–512, ; Arnold B. Bakker and Evangelia Demerouti, “The Job Demands‐Resources Model: State of the Art,” Journal of Managerial Psychology 22, no. 3 (January 1, 2007): 309–28, .

[5] Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, First Mariner Books edition (Boston New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021).

[6] Edward M. Corrado, “Low Morale and Burnout in Libraries,” Technical Services Quarterly 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 37–48, ; Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, “The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study,” Journal of Library Administration 57, no. 8 (November 17, 2017): 846–78, ; Kaetrena Davis Kendrick and Ione T. Damasco, “Low Morale in Ethnic and Racial Minority Academic Librarians: An Experiential Study,” Library Trends 68, no. 2 (2019): 174–212, ; Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” The Library with the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. .

[7] Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship.”

[8] Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship.”

[9] Denise Albieri Jodas Salvagioni, Francine Nesello Melanda, Arthur Eumann Mesas, Alberto Durán González, Flávia Lopes Gabani, and Selma Maffei de Andrade, “Physical, Psychological and Occupational Consequences of Job Burnout: A Systematic Review of Prospective Studies,” PLOS ONE 12, no. 10 (October 4, 2017): 1, .

[10] Salvagioni et al., 1.

[11] Salvagioni et al., 1.

Further Reading

Books

Jaffe, Sarah. Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. New York: Bold Type Books, 2022.

Nagoski, Emily, and Amelia Nagoski. Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020.

Petersen, Anne Helen. Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Boston New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

Schaffner, Anna Katharina. Exhaustion: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Articles

Maslach, Christina, Wilmar B. Schaufeli, and Michael P. Leiter. “Job Burnout.” Annual Review of Psychology 52, no. 1 (2001): 397-422.
Schaufeli, Wilmar B., and Bram P. Buunk. “Burnout: An Overview of 25 years of Research and Theorizing.” The Handbook of Work and Health Psychology 2, no. 1 (2003): 282-424.

Schaufeli, Wilmar B., Michael P. Leiter, and Christina Maslach. “Burnout: 35 years of Research and Practice.” Career Development International 14, no. 3 (2009): 204-220.

Demerouti, Evangelia, Arnold B. Bakker, Friedhelm Nachreiner, and Wilmar B. Schaufeli. “The Job Demands-Resources Model of Burnout.” Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 3 (2001): 499-512.

Bakker, Arnold B., Evangelia Demerouti, and Ana Isabel Sanz-Vergel. “Burnout and Work Engagement: The JD–R Approach.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 1, no. 1 (2014): 389-411.

Demerouti, Evangelia, and Arnold B. Bakker. “Job Demands-Resources Theory in Times of Crises: New Propositions.” Organizational Psychology Review 13, no. 3 (2023): 209-236.