Compassion Fatigue and Burnout: What Managers Should Know.

Most health care employees experience and are bolstered by compassion satisfaction as they deal with patients in need. However, the more empathetic a health care provider is, the more likely he or she will experience compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue is a negative syndrome that occurs when dealing with the traumatic experiences of patients, and examples of symptoms include intrusive thoughts, sleeping problems, and depression. Compassion fatigue is different from burnout. Compassion fatigue is a rapidly occurring disorder for primary health care workers who work with suffering patients, whereas burnout, a larger construct, is a slowly progressing disorder for employees who typically are working in burdensome organizational environments. Managers can mitigate problems associated with compassion fatigue with a number of interventions including patient reassignments, formal mentoring programs, employee training, and a compassionate organizational culture. With burnout, health care managers will want to focus primarily on chronic organizational problems.

Structured interview questions for selecting productive, emotionally mature, and helpful employees.

Behavioral description questions for a structured interview format are provided so that managers can probe an applicant's intelligence, emotional intelligence, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Research suggests that the best performing employees are high on intelligence, and the most socially competent employees are high on emotional intelligence. A study was conducted with a nursing department, and results indicate that emotional intelligence is related to organizational citizenship behaviors. Those individuals high on organizational citizenship behaviors exceed formal role expectations and positively influence organization outcomes.

Supervisory power and its influence on staff members and their customers.

The authors examined supervisors' selective use of legitimate, reward, coercive, referent, and expert powers and these power bases' influence on two outcomes: (a) employee perception of organizational support and (b) employee willingness to engage in service recovery activities with the customer. The authors found that the supervisor's use of expert, referent, and reward powers were positively related to perceived organizational support and that the use of coercive power was important in contributing to service recovery initiatives, particularly with regard to the employee's empathetic presentation to the customer.