Abstract:

The relationship that people have with their work, and the difficulties that can arise when that rapport goes awry, have been long recognized as a source of health problems that lead to stress, depression and burnout. But, at the same time, working environment can be a source of positive psychological state (engagement, job satisfaction, commitment, etc.). As a negative psychological state, Burnout is assumed to occur in individuals who work with people in some capacity, for instance in security, health care, social services, education, etc. Job burnout is a specific psychological condition in which, people experience emotional exhaustion, a lack of personal accomplishment and tending to depersonalize others. Burnout seems to be erosion of engagement with the job and work environment. The job and its settings that started out as important, meaningful and challenging for the individual become meaningless, unpleasant, unattractive. Nevertheless, engagement is characterized by energy, involvement, and efficacy which are the direct opposites of the three burnout dimensions (emotional exhaustion, a lack of personal accomplishment and depersonalization). In recent years, researches point out that teaching environment has been shown as a working context where the professionals can be more exposed to suffer the Burnout syndrome. The study focuses on examining Burnout syndrome from a positive psychology perspective: engagement.

The main aim of this study is to present the descriptive analysis of burnout syndrome and engagement in a sample of faculty members, and to examine to which extend levels of both constructs (burnout and engagement) contribute to labour satisfaction and general well-being. We hypothesize that the engagement dimensions will show greater predictive capacity regarding job satisfaction and general well-being. To achieve our objective, a survey was conducted to a sample of 264 Faculty members of Spanish universities. The Spanish version of Maslach Burnout Inventory was used to assess the burnout syndrome. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) was the instrument used to evaluate the engagement (energy, involvement, and efficacy). The Job Satisfaction and The Satisfaction with life scale (SWLS) were used. Regression Analysis (stepwise), Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and correlations were used main techniques of data analysis. Our findings highlight the relevance of the dimensions of Engagement, especially Involvement (dedication) and Energy as key factors that can positively affect psychological well-being of faculty members. This result supports previous studies stressed on the predictive ability of those dimensions to job satisfaction and subjective well-being and life satisfaction indicators. Our results are relevant since they show not only how to focus the effort to help faculty staff to tackle work-related stress but also to highlight the importance of promoting feelings of commitment or engagement in academic or staff members involved in teaching and research activities. Practical implications and recommendations for future researches are discussed.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Job Burnout, Engagement, Job Satisfaction, Life Satisfaction, Faculty Staff.