In plain language
Mental health work is rewarding but emotionally demanding, and burnout is common. This study asked whether the values people hold—and how well they manage to live them at work—are linked to their wellbeing and their risk of burning out. Rather than measuring an organisation’s values, it looked at each worker’s personally held values for life in general and for their work.
One hundred and six Australian mental health practitioners (psychologists, social workers, nurses and others) completed a card-sorting task in which they picked their 15 most important guiding principles for life and for work, and rated how successfully they had pursued each over the previous three months. They also completed standard measures of burnout and psychological wellbeing.
People whose life and work values overlapped more reported higher wellbeing and a stronger sense of accomplishment at work. Successfully pursuing work values—especially honesty, competence, clearly defined work, and pro-social values like accepting and helping others—was linked to lower burnout and higher wellbeing, and mattered more than success with general life values. The authors suggest that values clarification exercises could help workers reconnect with the meaning of their work, boosting wellbeing and reducing burnout.
Key findings
- Congruence between personal life values and personal work values was associated with higher psychological wellbeing (r = .25) and a greater sense of personal accomplishment at work.
- Honesty was the most frequently endorsed value overall, and both endorsing it and successfully living it (at work or in life) were linked to lower burnout and higher wellbeing.
- Success in pursuing work values predicted lower burnout and higher wellbeing more reliably than success in life values; work-value success uniquely explained 11.2% of the variance in total burnout.
- Successfully pursuing competence, clearly defined work, and meeting obligations was associated with lower burnout and/or higher wellbeing, suggesting goal clarity matters for practitioner health.
- Success with pro-social values—accepting others as they are and helping others—was related to lower burnout in both the work and life domains, fitting the shared values of caring professions.
- Values success accounted for 21% of the variance in burnout and 13% of the variance in psychological wellbeing overall.
How to cite
APA
Veage, S., Ciarrochi, J., Deane, F. P., Andresen, R., Oades, L. G., & Crowe, T. P. (2014). Value congruence, importance and success in the workplace: Links with well-being and burnout amongst mental health practitioners. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 3, 258–264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2014.06.004
BibTeX
@article{veage2014value,
title = {Value congruence, importance and success in the workplace: Links with well-being and burnout amongst mental health practitioners},
author = {Veage, Stephanie and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Deane, Frank P. and Andresen, Retta and Oades, Lindsay G. and Crowe, Trevor P.},
journal = {Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science},
volume = {3},
pages = {258--264},
year = {2014},
doi = {10.1016/j.jcbs.2014.06.004}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.