Research On The Job Burnout Phenomenon Among Grass-root Civil Servants

Job burnout is a phenomenon being researched a lot in various fields, but does not receive enough attention in the research field related to civil servants. In particular, there is a lack of study on the causes of civil servants’job burnout from the angle of their special working environments. It has been proved that poor autonomy, which is a common phenomenon among civil servants, is a major reason for job burnout. Since civil servants in the grass-roots level are typical in poor autonomy and job burnout, they are chosen as objects of this research, which tries to find the current situation of the job burnout phenomenon by using quantitative and qualitative research methods and to analyze the role of motivation in the forming of job burnout phenomenon from the perspective of self-determination theory. In this research, the author first interviews a small group of grass-root civil servants to make sure that there is job burnout phenomenon among them. Then, the author conducts a large sample research to find out the current situation of job burnout and examines their self-determination level. After clarifying the overall situation of the job burnout phenomenon among grass-root civil servants, the author makes quantitative analyses on the regression and correlation between self-determination and job burnout. Last, the author chooses those with severe job burnout to conduct in-depth interviews and content analyses so as to find underlying psychological mechanisms for the job burnout among grass-root civil servants.The researcher conducts a cluster sampling in a county in northern Henan province, sending questionnaires and psychological scales in the County Government and village governments. The total number of questionnaires and psychological scales including MBI, SDS and self-made questionnaires being sent out is367, with352of them being taken back as valid questionnaires. The effective rate is95.91%. The survey finds that job burnout is a pervading phenomenon among grass-root civil servants. Among all of its syndromes, sense of inefficacy ranks the top, sense of alienation and emotional exhaustion come the second and the third. The job burnout level is lower among the branch-level cadres than those civil servants in lower positions. The author, after doing quantitative research on the reason of job burnout from the perspective of self-determination theory, finds that the self-determination level of grass-root civil servants has a medium to high negative correlation with the overall job burnout level and its three dimensions. This means that grass-root civil servants’self-determination level reflects their job burnout level. What’s more, the self-determination level acts as a complete meditation in analyzing the influence of position on the job burnout level, which means that it can explain the reason why grass-root civil servants on different positions have different job burnout levels. The researcher, according to the above quantitative analysis, conducts qualitative researches on several typical samples trying to dig out the psychological mechanism leading the grass-root civil servants to job burnout. This research finds that grass-root civil servants, being influenced by the special personality factor, the physical environment factor and the grass-root administrative culture factor, has formed a unique self-determined motivation mechanism featuring low internal motivation, high external motivation and high no-motivation. This mechanism leads them to the senses of low self-efficacy, anxiety of social evaluation, acquired helplessness and emotional exhaustion, which result in job burnout. After finding out reasons of job burnout among grass-root civil servants, the author puts forward several tackling measures such as giving different incentives according to different positions, changing the distribution of power, strengthening moral encouragement etc. to remit this phenomenon.