Job-Burnout among medical librarians

Introduction Libraries play an important role in providing the scientific collections and resources of knowledge and scientific information for students and teachers. It would be very hard to achieve the educational aims of scholarly institutes, without providing the suitable information materials and necessary modern equipment in the university libraries. Librarians should be trained and skilled to answer the queries of patrons, who are referring to the libraries. Accomplishment and implementation of new technology in the libraries, cause the librarians to feel more stress. The stressful job environment may lead to job-burnout. Job-burnout is a psychological expression for describing the experiment of negative attitude, morale and behavior when people face work-related stressors.1 It affects the physical, emotional and mental exhaustion, combined with doubts about individuals’ competence and the value of their works.1 Motivating the employees is an important aspect of management. Making the employee motived is an operative method for correct application of human resources. Accepting the fact that the employees' motivation establishes the fundamental of productivity and efficiency of enterprise for reaching the success of organization and institution goals, we should make efforts to detect the factors that create highly motivated employees.2 Stress is a widespread factor which J Anal Res Clin Med, 2016, 4(4), 215-20. doi: 10.15171/jarcm.2016.036, http://journals.tbzmed.ac.ir/JARCM


Introduction
Libraries play an important role in providing the scientific collections and resources of knowledge and scientific information for students and teachers.It would be very hard to achieve the educational aims of scholarly institutes, without providing the suitable information materials and necessary modern equipment in the university libraries.Librarians should be trained and skilled to answer the queries of patrons, who are referring to the libraries.Accomplishment and implementation of new technology in the libraries, cause the librarians to feel more stress.The stressful job environment may lead to job-burnout.
Job-burnout is a psychological expression for describing the experiment of negative attitude, morale and behavior when people face work-related stressors. 1It affects the physical, emotional and mental exhaustion, combined with doubts about individuals' competence and the value of their works. 1otivating the employees is an important aspect of management.Making the employee motived is an operative method for correct application of human resources.Accepting the fact that the employees' motivation establishes the fundamental of productivity and efficiency of enterprise for reaching the success of organization and institution goals, we should make efforts to detect the factors that create highly motivated employees. 2tress is a widespread factor which everyone may face it in his/her daily life.The occupational stress that is identified as psychological and physical response to workplace stress is called job-burnout. 2 There are various theories about job-burnout, and many scientists have engaged themselves with burnout syndrome.Freudenberger was the first who defined the concept of job-burnout in 1970 in his article entitled "Staff Burn-Out as a specific psychological condition".Job-burnout is a wide-ranging phenomenon which interacts between employee's character and working atmosphere and may lead to loss of motivation and energy in one hand and reduction of performance in the other hands.According to Freudenberger's consideration, any occupation has more or few tension, but some professions may cause higher tensions especially the jobs dealing directly with human beings. 3he job-burnout syndrome is directly associated to the degree of individual's involvement in her/his occupation and the experience of frustration from failures to prevent the achievement.The lack of enough feedback may cause job-burnout in staff. 4,5aslach and Jackson explained the job-burnout syndrome as an emotional tiredness, depersonalization, and decreased personal achievement. 6The three dimensions of job-burnout which were explained by Maslach and Jackson are: 1. Emotional exhaustion 2. Depersonalization 3. Reduced personal accomplishment 7 Emotional exhaustion is the phenomenon of a person's feeling emotionally exhausted and "tired" because of his/her daily interaction with people.It is a job-related stress which appears in staff who interconnect with other persons in challenging situations.Consequently, such individuals feel ineffective and incompetent to accomplish the needs of their patrons, as they were able to do it before, and recognize their job as a torture, that makes it problematic. 8The exhaustion is the result of a continuous and repetitive work, which makes the unpleasant sense through the time.It is noticeable that the symptoms of jobburnout are various and it should not be mistaken with common and transient exhaustions. 9epersonalization: Stating the interpersonal aspect of burnout, depersonalization comprises harsh, negative and uninterested behaviors toward others. 10eople may show some actions like losing business aims and passion as a consequence of getting away from one's self and work, and being uninterested to the people who are served, and presenting negative, unfriendly responses. 11ow personal accomplishment: Low personal accomplishment is when the individual starts to feel inadequate and ineffective.In other words, individual tends to assess him/herself disadvantageous.12 Person who experience this tendency may consider themselves as if they are not able to progress in their job; inversely, they think they are ineffective in their job and they are not able to make any changes in their environment.13,14 Maslach et al. restructured the description of burnout; stating that burnout is "a condition of emotional tiredness, depersonalization, and reduced individual achievement which may happen among those who work with people in some capacity".15 All people feel some degree of stress in their job's environment and this fact is a noticeable and unavoidable.The final result of stress which affects the persons is job burnout. Thword of job-burnout is referred to the pressures that present in the place of work, and the symptoms including atrophy, frustration and isolation in workforces.16 Maslach and Leiter explained the term of job-burnout as decreasing the psychological and physical energy of employees that expose them to exhaustion.Emotional exhaustion may happen when, "a worker's resources are exhausted and the workers feel, they are not able to keep themselves in a psychological level".13 Potter believes that the symptoms of burnout syndrome are: interactive problems, health problems, decreased effectiveness, substance abuse, feeling of weakness, family stress, rejection of making relations, degeneration of relationships in job environment.17 Internal and/or external factors can possibly affect the job-burnout.The internal factors consist of one's features, characteristic property, values and approaches, efficacy, self-control, professional expectations, the length of services, the public support, family construction and the passionate permanency.The external issues include the extreme workload, the burden of work, the absence of fairness, the absence of work safety, and the lack of chances for promotion.18 The results of various studies indicate that the job-burnout appears in different populations such as educators, social workers, medical and mental health-related personnel, child-care workers, police officers, lawyers, and librarians. 15 Alough the academic libraries are located in the noiselessness environment of research and education centers, they are not immune from job-burnout.The librarians and staff who are working in the library environment are vulnerable to suffering from job-burnout.The pressure of providing services to the university students, repeated technological modifications, the stress of promotion and new library requirements expose the academic librarians toward job-burnout.This current study aims to investigate the major factors that lead to the job-burnout among academic librarians.

Methods
The questionnaires were administered among all librarians working in the libraries of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran, 2016.Only 40 of 51 agreed to participate in the study; therefore, a total number of 40 questionnaires were completed and analyzed.
In this study, two different types of questionnaire were used for gathering data.
First, the factors that affect job-burnout.Second, we used the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) for measurement of job-burnout.The MBI consisted of 25 items which divided into four sub-scales evaluating each of the scopes related to the job-burnout (emotional exhaustion = 9, personal performance = 8, depersonalization = 5, involvement = 3).After scoring the questions for every subject, the total scores of dimensions were summed up and classified as low, moderate, and high.

Results
Analysis of gathered data showed that the majority of the interviewed librarians (30 out of 40, 75%) were females and 25% of the participants were male.Of all the participants, 33.3% were in the age group of 31-40.The average age of participants was 37.9 years.More than half of all participants (57.5%) had bachelor degree and the rest (42.5%) had master's degree.The work experience of most participants was more than 20 years.
Table 1 shows the answers to the 20 questions regarding the factors that affect job-burnout in order of the importance among participants.
To answer the third question (the rate of job-burnout among medical librarians), the job-burnout was measured in four dimensions of personal-performance, emotionalexhaustion, depersonalization, and involvement.The range of scores for job-burnout from high to low levels for each subscale is presented in table 2. Greater scores of depersonalization and emotional exhaustion show the higher level of job-burnout.The lower scores of personal performance and involvement represented the upper level of job-burnout.As shown in table 2, the high level of job-burnout was associated to emotional exhaustion (38.7 ± 1.70), as well as depersonalization (30.0 ± 6.24).
The table specified the low levels of job-burnout for personal performance (10.5 ± 0.70) and low level of job-burnout in involvement (3.25 ± 2.19).

Discussion
This study aimed to explore the levels of jobburnout among librarians working in medical university.We are aware that the cut-off points of job-burnout may differ from institute to institute and from country to country.Since there is not a systematic study to determine the specific cut-off points for Iranian librarians; we should be careful to interpret the exhaustion level of Iranian librarians.
The results of this current study revealed that the majority of librarians (92.5%) working in different libraries were displeased from the economic compensation of their wages as well as the low status of their profession in the society (90.0%).These results are in agreement with the prior study of Biglu et al. 19 The frequency and intensity of emotional exhaustion were the two measures with the highest level contributing to job-burnout.The personal performance was in both measures at low level, depersonalization was in both scales at high level.The involvement showed high frequency (3.25 ± 2.19) and low intensity (4.15 ± 2.88).Regarding high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low level of personal performance and involvement, the participants in this study were vulnerable to the job-burnout.Likewise, the study of Zahiri et al. showed that the majority of nurses working in the surgery wards of Ahwaz hospitals, Iran, were affected by the high levels of personal inefficacy, depersonalization, and emotional fatigue. 20ndividuals were affected by high levels of emotional fatigue, depersonalization, and personal inefficacy, and the level of personal inefficacy was higher than emotional fatigue and depersonalization.The presence of stress, heavy workload, and difficult working conditions, make them vulnerable and in need of receiving special support and attention from managers at all levels.The results of study conducted by Taee et al. which showed high frequency (70%) for low levels of emotional exhaustion and personal performance (54%), and high levels of depersonalization (94.7%) for physicians is in consistence with the result of our study.

Conclusion
Analysis of data concluded that the university librarians believe the low level of wages and benefits, the low status of librarians' profession in the society, the deficiency of promotion and occupation advancement, and incorrect assessment of the librarians' job performance, have the major impact on the librarians' job-burnout.

Limitations
This study focused on the current status of librarians.For comprehensive analysis we need to follow up the participants and compare their status in different situations.In addition, the study focused only on the librarians working in one university, therefore another study should be done by complete population from all universities located in the region.

Table 1 .
Factors affecting the job-burnout 21

Table 2 .
Job-burnout and its dimensions on the scale of frequency and severity SD: Standard deviation