Nonprofit Organizations Burnout Analysis

The nonprofit organizations that operated over a decade ago functioned during a period of tremendous growth, which saw a significant influx of available funding for creative work in the area of human services. Additionally, each individual nonprofit organization had significantly more flexibility in the management of organizational affairs. The 1980’s and 90’s ushered in a new era of critical change, which saw increasing market competition that inevitably made the task of operating a nonprofit organization significantly more complex. During this period of time, more stringent business demands were placed on nonprofit organizations, which drove the organizations to become more accountable and organizationally driven. This resulted in a “heavy human debt.” Staff burnout was a result of the “need to replace diminished financial capital with human capital. The downside of this type of organization is that its workers

“Burnout” as described by Maslach and Jackson (1986) in Olinske & Hellman (2016) is the emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and lack of personal accomplishment which arises in individuals who perform human service related work (p. 3). Job related stressors, which have the tendency to transform into to exhaustion, which can further mutate into depersonalization, which is exhibited as cynicism. This situation, if left unimproved, will cause an individual to begin to experience a lack of personal accomplishment and ultimately cause burnout (Olinske & Hellman, 2016, p. 3). Additionally, “research by Schaufeli and Enzmann (1998) discovered other demands, such as heavy workload, time pressure, and conflicts related to an individual’s positions supporting human service organization could be directly connected with indicators of burnout” (Olinske & Hellman, 2016, p.