Exhaustion and job satisfaction among internal and external outplacement counsellors

ABSTRACT

When organisations make employees redundant, they increasingly offer outplacement counselling to them, either in-house or as a service of specialised companies. Despite outplacement counsellors’ importance, their work-related stress has not been studied yet. In this paper we argue that internal (in-house) outplacement counsellors have a particularly demanding job (especially because being employed by firing organisations should increase role conflicts among internal outplacement counsellors) and they should thus be more emotionally exhausted than external outplacement counsellors. Data from 98 German outplacement counsellors supported this argumentation. Mediation analyses showed that these differences were mediated by increased role conflicts, consistent with role theory arguments. The same effect was found for counsellors’ job satisfaction. These results help understanding the stress that outplacement counsellors experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Outplacement counselling
• burnout
• role conflicts
• job satisfaction
• stress

Acknowledgements

Manuela Richter works now for Radeberger Gruppe, Frankfurt/Main, Germany; Christina Brausch works now for Eberspächer Unternehmensgruppe, Saarbrücken, Germany Jessica Gaszka works now for crealytics GmbH, Berlin, Germany. The order of the third and the fourth author was alphabetically determined.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuela Richter

Manuela Richter received her PhD in psychology from the Universität des Saarlandes (Saarbrücken, Germany), and was awarded the prize for the best dissertation of the Work and Organizational Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society. She currently works for the Radeberger Gruppe, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Cornelius J. König

Cornelius J. König is a professor of work and organisational psychology at the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany. His main research interests are personnel selection, job insecurity and firing, time management, and the research–practitioner gap.

Christina Brausch

Christina Brausch studied psychology at the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany, and currently works for Eberspächer Unternehmensgruppe in Neunkirchen, Germany.

Jessica Gaszka

Jessica Gaszka studied psychology at the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany, and now works for crealytics GmbH in Berlin, Germany.