Burnout and work engagement in the South African Police Service / Karina Storm

• Main Author: Storm, Karina
• Published: Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10394/1569

Tracking and addressing police members' effectiveness in areas that could impact on the standard of their services is important. Burnout and work engagement are specific focus areas in this regard. To measure burnout and work engagement, it is important to use reliable and valid instruments. However, there is a lack of empirical research systematically investigating police burnout and work engagement in South Africa, as well as serious limitations, including poorly designed studies, a lack of sophisticated statistical analyses and poorly controlled studies. Furthermore, South Africa is a multicultural society and therefore, when burnout and work engagement measures are applied to different cultural groups, issues of equivalence and bias become important. Because a lack of South African norms exists for the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS) and Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), it is difficult to identify burnout and work engagement. Therefore, it is important to determine norms for the levels of burnout and work engagement that could serve as reference for police officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS). It also seems relevant to consider differences in burnout and work engagement between different demographic groups as well as between the different provinces in South Africa. Furthermore, it appears as if job stressors and coping strategies may be related to burnout and work engagement. However, no studies were found that included these factors in a causal model of burnout or work engagement in police officers in South Africa The objectives of this research were to standardise the MBI-GS and the UWES for the SAPS and to determine equivalence and bias for each instrument, to determine norms and demographic differences between burnout and work engagement levels and to test a causal model that could explain the role of job stress and coping in burnout and work engagement === Thesis (Ph.D. (Industrial Psychology))--Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 2003.