Burnout: The Cost of Caring - Tapa blanda

This book shows how to recognize, prevent and cure burnout syndrome for nurses, teachers, counselors, doctors, therapists, police, social workers, and anyone else who cares about and for people. Christina Maslach, the leading pioneer in research on burnout, offers help using illustrative examples and first-hand accounts. She points out what causes the feelings of emotional exhaustion, the callous indifference to people's problems, and the sense of inadequacy about one's ability to help and relate to others.

Christina Maslach is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her A.B., magna cum laude, in Social Relations from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1967, and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1971. She has conducted research in a number of areas within social and health psychology. However, she is best known as one of the pioneering researchers on job burnout, and the author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used research measure in the burnout field. In addition to numerous articles, her books on this topic include Burnout: The Cost of Caring; the co-edited volume, Professional Burnout: Recent Developments in Theory and Research (with Wilmar Schaufeli); The Truth About Burnout (with Michael Leiter); Preventing Burnout and Building Engagement: A Complete Program for Organizational Renewal (with Michael Leiter), and Banishing Burnout: Six Strategies for Improving Your Relationship with Work (with Michael Leiter). The latter publications are based on Professor Maslach's work as a consultant with various organizations on issues of job burnout. Currently, she is the founding co-editor, with Michael Leiter, of the e-journal, Burnout Research, which will launch in 2014. Professor Maslach focuses on the development of a conceptual model of the burnout process, which articulates the key relationships between personal, social, and contextual variables. She takes an approach to assessing the interaction between person and situation variables in the workplace. She has identified six core dimensions on which there can be a significant mismatch between the person and the workplace, all of which predict higher levels of burnout (these six areas are assessed by the Areas of Worklife Scale). She focuses on the positive antithesis of burnout, work engagement, as a better framework for developing interventions, and has conducted several longitudinal assessments of burnout and engagement, which are providing opportunities to test both new research hypotheses and new intervention processes. She is also working actively with colleagues in China and Latin America, to establish standard translations of the MBI and other measures, to develop a robust program of cross-cultural research.