Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Maslach 1978 Cliente y SB
Maslach 1978 Cliente y SB
Maslach 1978 Cliente y SB
Ill
112 CHRISTINA MASLACH
CLIENT FACTORS
One crucial aspect of the staff-client interaction that can have
a major determining influence on the level of emotional stress
is the particular role played by the client. The type of problems
facing the client, the nature of the staff member's relationship
to the client, the rules governing that relationship, and the client
stance and reactions to staff are all elements of the client role
that can affect staff burn-out.
Type of Client Problems
By definition, most clients are people with problems. Whether
they are sick, in trouble, unable to care for themselves, or
experiencing some other kind of difficulty, this negative part
of themselves and their life is what the staff member sees. TThis
focus on negative information is further enhanced by the staff
member's tendency to pay less attention to, or even ignore, what
is good and healthy about the clients, since that is often not
immediately relevant to the problem under consideration. In some
instances such positive information is even deliberately withheld
by the clients, since it could reduce the amount of funds or services
which they could receive. As a consequence of this negative focus,
the interaction between client and staff person is often charged
with strong emotions, such as embarrassment, fear, frustration.
CLIENTS AND BURN-OUT 115
a divorce for a client may not appear to the legal aid attorney
as much progress toward a better life for that person). In some
cases, the lack of successful change is viewed as evidence of the
staff member's failure to do a good job. This is especially true
when the same client keeps coming back with the same (or similar)
problems. Staff people often feel that their successes go away
but their failures keep coming back to haunt them and provide
constant visible proof that they are incompetent or make mistakes.
To ward off these feelings of failure and ineffectiveness, staff
may shift the blame for lack of positive change from themselves
to the clients and view them as inherently defective, unmotivated,
bad, or weak: "If they can't change after all I've done for them,
then let's face it—there's something basically wrong with them."
One other aspect of client problems that has relevance for
staff burn-out is whether the problem is chronic or acute. In
many situations that we have observed, it is the "chronics" that
cause more emotional stress for the staff. An acute problem may
be more severe, but it is often less frequent, more clearly linked
to an identifiable cause (or set of causes), and therefore more
amenable to some sort of staff intervention. Furthermore, staff
are often well trained to handle acute, crisis situations. Not only
are they more capable of doing a good job in these cases, but
they have an opportunity to demonstrate how successfully they
can apply their skills and meet the challenge. In contrast, staff
often feel less equipped to handle repeatedly the more mundane
problems of clients who won't go away and never seem to show
signs of improvement. As an example, staff of suicide prevention
centers often find that they are more emotionally drained by
the chronic telephone callers who call one or more times each
day, than by the occasional caller who is seriously considering
suicide at that moment.
Personal Relevance of Client Problems
There will be greater emotional stress in the staff-client
interaction whenever the staff member looks at the client's situation
and thinks "that could be me." If the client's plight resembles
a past experience of the staff member, it may bring back unpleasant
memories or unresolved feelings. Or the client could be undergo-
ing something that is certain to happen to the staff person in
the future (e.g., death), and this may arouse strong fears and
anxieties. The staff person may overidentify with the client and
share in his or her feelings and frustrations.
Getting close to the client's problems can have the advantage
CLIENTS AND BURN-OUT 117
aid, while the staff member will feel overburdened and helpless
in the face of continuous client demands that never seem to
be satisfied.
Client Stance
In their contacts with professional staff over the years, people
become socialized to behave in a passive and dependent way as
clients. They learn to follow directions, speak only when spoken
to, answer questions, and call upon someone else for help and
guidance with their own problems. The model that is operating
here is one of an authority figure who has knowledge, resources,
and power and a client who has not. The staff person gives,
the client receives.
On the one hand, this passive-dependent stance of clients
has several advantages for the professional staff person. It makes
clients far more manageable, since they are unlikely to question,
interrupt, or resist the actions taken by the staff member. Passive
clients are more easily seen as objects than as people, and can
more easily be categorized as a particular client type. By employing
a client typology (Mennerick, 1974), the staff member can minimize
emotional involvement with clients. Furthermore, client depen-
dence on staff serves to validate the staff person's sense of
importance and competence, since it demonstrates how much
he or she is needed by other people.
However, this typical passive-dependent client stance can be
a double-edged sword for staff. Just as it can ease the staff's
contact with clients, so can it make it more stressful. Most
significantly, it places a tremendous burden of responsibility on
the staff person. The client's fate is in the staff member's hands,
and so the latter's decisions are fraught with anxiety. The staff
member is more likely to feel emotionally overwhelmed by the
client's problems in these circumstances, particularly when some
of them can be attributed to action taken by the staff member
(e.g., a treatment for one medical problem leads to the develop-
ment of another). In addition, the dependent client often clings
to the staff member for constant guidance and in some cases
never seems to go away. When staff complain about clients who
"cannot stand on their own two feet," who call regularly about
any problem no matter how trivial and who cannot seem to do
anything without specific directions from the staff person, they
often fail to recognize that the source of these difficulties is the
clients' passivity and dependence which the staff themselves have
done much to encourage.
120 CHRISTINA MASLACH
CONCLUSION
When considering the dynamics of the staff-client relationship,
it is important to keep in mind that there are two participants
who shape and direct the interaction and the thoughts and feelings
that arise from it. Just as staff can dehumanize clients by processing
them in a standardized way, ignoring their pleas and demands,
and judging them as somehow less capable and worthy than
themselves, so clients can dehumanize staff by failing to acknowl-
edge their presence, failing to follow their advice or guidance,
and failing to provide positive (instead of exclusively negative)
feedback. These dehumanization processes are interrelated ones
which can gradually escalate in intensity and frequency. If we
hope to improve the quality of staff-client contacts, we need to
focus on changes on both sides of the exchange. The institutional
system ultimately translates into people, and it is the way each
of these people interacts with others that can either promote
human values or destroy them.
REFERENCE NOTES
1. Maslach, C. Burn-out: A social psychological analysis. Paper presented at
the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco,
August 1977.
2. Maslach, C , & Jackson, S. E. A scale measure to assess experienced burn-out:
The Maslach Burn-Out Inventory. Paper presented at the meeting of the
Western Psychological Association, San Francisco, April 1978.
3. Freudenberger, H. J. The staff burn-out syndrome. Washington, D.C: Drug
Abuse Council, 1975.
REFERENCES
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of medical practice. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Maslach, C. Burned-out. Human Behavior, September 1976, pp. 16-22.
Maslach, C. Job burnout: How people cope. Public Welfare, 1978, 36, 56-58.
Maslach,-C. The burn-out syndrome and patient care. In C. Garfield (Ed.),
Stress and survival. St. Louis: Mosby, in press.
Maslach, C , & Jackson, S. E. Lawyer burnout. Barrister, Spring 1978, pp.
8; 52-54.
124 CHRISTINA MASLACH
Maslach, C, & Pines, A. The burn-out syndrome in the day care setting.
Child Care Quarterly, \911, 6, 100-113.
Mennerick, L. A. Client typologies: A method of coping with conflict in
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1974, 1, 396-418.
Pines, A., & Maslach, C. Characteristics of staff burnout in mental health
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Ryan, W. Blaming the victim. New York: Pantheon Books, 1971.