“Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!” Interpersonal strain at work and burnout

Abstract

Interpersonal strain represents the feeling of discomfort and disengagement in the relationships with people at work resulting from exceeding social requests and pressures. This article has three aims: (1) to introduce the Interpersonal Strain at Work scale (ISW), (2) to examine its construct validity and reliability, and its relationship with the Maslach Burnout Inventory exhaustion and cynicism; and (3) to test the generalizability of the ISW across different work settings. Multilevel CFA on two samples of call centre agents (5407) and hospital professionals (753), nested in 191 and 43 units, respectively, confirmed the good psychometric properties of the ISW and its distinctiveness from established burnout dimensions. The generalizability of ISW was also supported. Interpersonal strain at work seems to be a promising construct to recapture the interpersonal nature of the burnout syndrome that was lost when the concept of burnout was extended beyond the human services.

Keywords:

• Burnout
• Interpersonal strain
• Interpersonal Strain at Work Scale

Notes

¹ As a preliminary step to data analysis, the influence of the nesting ingenerated by the presence of the seven management services was explored. Using the ICC, we were able to find only a minor influence due to data nesting (mean ICC .015, SD = 0.012), in the range often defined as negligible. As current multilevel modelling prevents us from considering more than two levels in the analysis (i.e., the “individual level”, and the group, or “unit level”; see Muthén & Muthén, 2004), in subsequent analyses we concentrate only on the group (or work unit) level, which, instead, significantly contributed to the nested structure of the data.

² As for Study 1, the influence of the nesting ingenerated by the 7 hospitals was explored. The ICC resulted low (mean ICC .009, SD = 0.023). Thus, as in Study 1, only the group (or work unit) level is considered in the analyses.

³ This scale is a translation into English of the original Italian version, which needs to be validated in an English-speaking sample.