Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » The gap between expectation and reward

January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The gap between expectation and reward

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New York Magazine has a great article on the study of burnout. I find myself constantly wavering between euphoria and existential languish thanks to my overwhelming workload (which may explain this post at 5am.) My favorite part of being in Japan last week was no cell phone or Crackberry. I found that I was more focused and able to explain things like SOA in fairly lucid terms.

Now that I am back to the grind, I have IM, Skype, email, and 2 phones tormenting all day long. I can't seem to train myself to let the emails go--you can't tell but I just paused to read 2 more that came in just this minute. I am up to 40 emails and its only 5:30am. Sigh.

It's hard to know if all this work will ever pay off. One of the things I've always liked about OSS is that there is a feeling that we are doing something for the greater good. Then I get bogged down with licensing crap and it undermines many positive feelings.

Like the science of all emotion, attempts to quantify, analyze, and define burnout have a slightly stilted, unnatural quality. It's a problem that's both physical and existential, an untidy agglomeration of external symptoms and private frustrations—how could such stuff be plotted on a graph? (I keep thinking of Bill Murray and those golf balls-or Bill Murray and his Suntory whiskeys in Lost in Translation, for that matter. Does a culture even need a definition of burnout when it has Bill Murray?) But researchers have nevertheless made valiant efforts to try. In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback). “I once talked to a pediatric dentist,” she says, “and he said, ‘A good day is when there are no screamers.’ And I’m sure half the people he was talking about were the parents.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Maslach's research is that burnout isn’t necessarily a result of overwork. It can be, certainly. Michael Leiter, a lovely Canadian fellow and frequent collaborator of Maslach's, has elegantly called burnout a “crisis in self-efficacy,” which to me suggests that head-banging feeling of struggling mightily for too little or (worse) nothing in return. Ayala Pines, a researcher in Israel who’s looked at burnout in all sorts of inspired contexts (including marriage), rather heartbreakingly sums up the problem as “the failure of the existential quest”-that moment when we wake up one morning and realize that what we’re doing has appallingly little value. She studied the insurance business, for example, a profession often associated with the ultimate cubicle tedium. Yet she noticed something very interesting. “The ones who had some traumatic experience related to insurance when they were children—their house burned down or whatever—they can work for a long time without burning out,” she says. “Because they came to the profession with a calling. They feel their work is significant.”

Posted by Dave Rosenberg on January 31, 2007 05:26 AM

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