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Impact of burnout on employees' performance: An analysis of banking

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Article  in  World Review of Entrepreneurship Management and Sustainable Development · January 2015

DOI: 10.1504/WREMSD.2015.066980

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88 World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sust. Development, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2015

Impact of burnout on employees’ performance:

an analysis of banking industry

Wali Ur Rehman and Saquib Yusaf Janjua*

Department of Management Sciences,
Park Road Chak Shahzad, Islamabad, Pakistan
Email: wrehman88@gmail.com
Email: raja_saqy@hotmail.com
*Corresponding author

Hummayoun Naeem
Department of Management Sciences,
Foundation University,
Rawalpindi Campus,
1-New Lalazar Road, Rawalpindi, Pakistan
Email: hummayoun@yahoo.com

Abstract: The study is conducted to assess the impact of burnout on

performance of the employees working in sales departments of banking
industry in Pakistan. Data was collected from 322 sales officers working in
banks. Regression analysis was used to assess the impact of burnout on
performance and relationship between intrinsic motivation, job satisfaction,
their intention to leave, role conflict, role ambiguity, burnout and performance
of the sales officers. The result shows that burnout had a significant positive
impact on the performance of sales officers. Performance, satisfaction and
intention to leave were positively related to each other; however these variables
had negative relationships with intention to leave, burnout, role conflict and
role ambiguity. It is recommended that the management of banks should;
formulate clear job descriptions, specify unity in chain of command, assign
achievable targets to employees according to their capabilities, recognise
performance through rationalised incentives and provide trainings to new
entrants. The research can be replicated in other industries and by increasing
the sample size for generalisation of the results.

Keywords: burnout; performance; intrinsic motivation; intention to leave; role

conflict; role ambiguity; job satisfaction; banks; Pakistan.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Rehman, W.U.,

Janjua, S.Y. and Naeem, H. (2015) ‘Impact of burnout on employees’
performance: an analysis of banking industry’, World Review of
Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 11, No. 1,
pp.88–105.

Biographical notes: Wali Ur Rehman has served as Project Manager (project

management) in public service organisations of Pakistan. He worked in Higher
Education Commission, Islamabad. Currently, he is enrolled as a PhD scholar
in Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information
Technology. His main areas of research are HRM, organisational behaviour and
general management.

Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 89

Saquib Yusaf Janjua has served as Assistant Director (Admn & HR) in public
sector organisations in Pakistan. Currently, he is working as an Assistant
Professor in Department of Management Sciences, CIIT Islamabad and
teaching MS and PhD students. He had also been part as adjunct faculty at
different universities in Pakistan where he taught courses at graduate and
undergraduate level. His main areas of interests are change management and
business strategies, competence development, management development,
emerging issues in leadership, training and development.

Hummayoun Naeem, an Exeter University (UK) MBA, received his PhD in

Management Science from Foundation University, Islamabad. He has also
received his post doctorate from Turkey. During his PhD, he developed and
empirically tested a quality management model for commercial branch banking
operations. The said research got acknowledged and recognised as an
independent school of thought in management science by The Croatian
Economics Research Journal. He is an author of a book that has been published
by Lambert Publishing, Germany.

1 Introduction

Stress becomes inevitable when one works under some dynamic environment, which is
not completely under one’s control. Stress may take many forms but being concerned
with organisations and management sciences field, researchers are concerned about
organisation related stress (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993). According to Maslach (1978)
burnout is a behavioural condition of employees when they are not in a position to bear
extra professional pressure and feel totally annoyed with the environment. Such feelings
put them on the verge of the exit point where they tend to move from just-pleasant
condition to start experiencing burnout. From that point they start reacting abnormally in
the same setting, once they were comfortable in. Burnout is more often treated as a
catalyst towards the deteriorated performance of the employees, specifically in service
sector. Burnout is a kind of response which surfaces due to the lasting exposure towards
various kinds of stressors, the important of those are the job related stressors. Burnout
affects employees in three fold viz; emotional exhaustion, negative self-evaluation
towards the personal accomplishment and depersonalisation – treating other people as if
they were non-humans. Once these kinds of feelings are developed in the employees, it is
inevitable for the employees and the organisations to bear costs which they would not
have borne otherwise.
According to Cordes and Dougherty (1993), the main reasons for the burnout being
felt by the employees are characterised into three broad categories of characteristics,
which are:

1 job and role

2 organisational

3 personal characteristics.
90 W.U. Rehman et al.

However, the most important of these characteristics is the job and role related stressors.
There are two main categories of role related stressors, which are role conflict and role
ambiguity; former is a result of receiving instructions from more than one supervisor,
however, latter is a result when employees have undefined set of responsibilities assigned
by the management. As argued by Maslach (1978), very frequent interaction with the
customers regarding addressing their queries and attempting to solve the same, results in
stress in an environment where sufficient resources required to complete such jobs are
not provided. The resources may range from physical infrastructure to conduciveness of
the environment to work in; from basic compensation structure to contingency rewards
settlements to employee’s recognition systems to management behaviour towards
employees.
There may be some other personal characteristics which also make employees feel
burnout. This lot of the factors is considered as demographic factors, which are gender,
age, tenure, expectation (a tacit variable) of employees about the working conditions, job
status and remuneration. Employees’ concerns and expectations towards their career
advancement in the current settings also contribute a lot towards burnout. Research
showed that sales officers’ attitudes and behaviours are explained by level of burnout they
are experiencing, especially in high stressed working conditions (Lee and Ashforth,
1996). Singh et al. (1994) argued that working outside organisations and having frequent
interactions with customers are attributed towards unstructured and more demanding
nature of the job, respectively. Burnout of the professionals working in banking
industry especially in the sales departments has been attributed to unscheduled working
timings, their sole dependence on the commission-based salaries, unachievable targets,
inappropriate career advancement opportunities, insufficient resources, lack of team
support, possibilities of unwanted transfers from one department to other etc. Efficiency
of banks depends on performance of its sales officers. According to Homburg and Stock
(2004) sales officers when fully satisfied with their jobs are very efficient in dealing with
the customers. Extra work load on sales officers from the bank and excessive demands of
the customers make them emotionally exhausted and they declare the banks responsible
for it (Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Jackson and Maslach, 1982). Current study considered
individual behaviours of employees working in dynamic environment, i.e., public dealing
setup. Singh et al. (1994) empirically demonstrated that burnout has a negative impact on
the attitude and behaviour of employees.
Burnout is tri-dimensional behavioural response condition, e.g., emotional
exhaustion, diminished personal accomplishment and depersonalisation (Maslach, 1982;
Maslach and Jackson, 1981; Pines and Maslach, 1980). Jackson and Maslach (1982)
termed burnout as umbrella concept having three dimensions, which are found to be
interrelated to each other. Emotional exhaustion is the vital dimension of burnout, which
refers to total exhaustion of emotional feelings of an employee. Depersonalisation is the
second dimension of burnout and refers to employee’s isolated behaviour and his
subsequent detachment from people around, including co-workers, clients, customers,
subordinates and supervisors. The last dimension is diminished personal accomplishment;
wherein employee underestimates his capabilities and negatively evaluates his
achievements and accomplishments which is also termed as negative self evaluation and
feels ineffectiveness regarding actual job performance (Maslach et al., 2001).
There are several reasons for studying burnout and its impact on employee’s
performance. Firstly, the behavioural consequences of burnout in terms of high turnover,
absenteeism and diminished level of performance result in unpredictable costs to banks
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 91

(Cordes and Dougherty, 1993). Secondly, the studies already conducted on burnout are
related to the medical profession and other highly stressed environments, but burnout is
also important and prevailing in environment where personal selling is involved (Lee and
Ashforth, 1996). The responsibilities in dealing with customers together with fear of
accountability result in vulnerability of the employees to stress and ultimately burnout as
a result of extreme stress. Current financial crunch and economical instability in the
country result in excessive work-load and accountability on the sales officers working in
Pakistan. Sales officers, working in banks have continuous and repeated contacts with
their customers outside the banks, are more susceptible to harmful effects of burnout
(Leiter and Maslach, 1988).
Adding further to the historical background of the issue it is important to mention
here that the employees working in banking industry are more prone to the burnout,
which subsequently affects their performance because they are involved in the vital
resource (i.e., money) of their customers. To identify the organisational factors which
may motivate, satisfy or other way around the employees of the organisation, there is a
dire need to consider the organisational level factor as well as demographic variables as
age, gender, experience and qualification to explore their relative impact on the burnout,
satisfaction and performance of the employees. The present research explores different
relationships and differences considering burnout and performance of the sales officers
working in the banking sector of Pakistan. However, the specific problem statement
containing problem questions of the study is stated as below:
What is the impact of burnout on performance of the sales officers working in
banking sector? Does the intrinsic motivation level of the sales officers mediate the
impact of burnout on performance? The study explores impact of burnout on performance
of sales officers working in various banks operating in Rawalpindi and Islamabad (twin
cities of Pakistan). These cities are taken as a respondent population because banks,
operating in Pakistan, are concentrated in these two areas in term of their branches and
outlets. The study further investigates the differences in burnout level between sales
officers with respect to gender, age groups and specifically origin of the banks they are
working for.

1.1 Objectives of the study

The objectives of the study are to explore the level of burnout, performance, job
satisfaction, role conflict, role ambiguity, their intention to leave the organisation and
intrinsic motivation level of sales officers. Furthermore, impact of burnout and other
variables on the behavioural variables is explored. Differences in the variables with
respect to local and foreign banks, as well as younger and older employees were also
explored.
The study is a contribution to the extant body of knowledge in human resource
management (HRM) in understanding and identifying the factors which cause extreme
stress. The study further contributes in validating (or otherwise) the results of previous
studies including that of Radhey et al. (2004) in a different scenario. Further to this,
researchers extensively studied burnout level of doctors, public service workers, teachers,
nurses and librarians and its impact on their performance (Brookings et al., 1996; Tsigilis
et al., 2004). The current study by analysing burnout and its impact on performance of
sales officers in banking sector of Pakistan is a contribution in the field of HRM.
92 W.U. Rehman et al.

2 Literature review

It has been shown that stress plays a dysfunctional role in organisations, which causes
high costs to the organisations and employees in terms of high absenteeism and turnover
and less productivity (Jackson and Maslach, 1982; Leiter and Maslach, 1988; Shirom,
1989). The results of these researches depicted that organisational stress is always bad for
the employees and the organisations if it is the outcome of the issues related to the
organisations. Robbins (2001) defined stress as a condition where somebody is unable to
decide when he confronted with the good, bad or neutral situation related to his work
conditions. Organisational-based factors are contributing towards stress for the
employees in the organisational settings (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985). von Onciul
(1996) termed these factors as the organisational role stressors for the workers. According
to Gianakos (2000) stress caused by these stressors have contributed towards diminishing
satisfaction and hence increased turnover and their intentions to leave the organisation,
which lead to low performance.
According to Radhey et al. (2004), the organisational role stress has very strong and
positive relationship with the emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and have no
relationship with personal accomplishment. Singh et al. (1994) argued that salespeople
feel stress from various sources while working in dynamic environment prevailing in
banking industry. The tendency of the younger people toward burnout is very high as
compared to older employees; however, the same is true for the tenure of the employees,
i.e., it is higher in the employees having less experience in the job as compared to those
having more job experience (Radhey et al., 2004).
Intrinsic motivation is defined as an employee’s feelings about his job, i.e., whether
he has the required competency to complete comfortably or lacks them and faces some
difficulties in performing it (Keaveney and Nelson, 1993). In other words, when
employees enjoy working something that means they are intrinsically motivated to
perform that task. According to Keaveney and Nelson (1993) highly intrinsically
motivated employee performs well and yields better results. Intrinsically motivated
employees are in a better position to solve work related obstacles and are less susceptible
to burnout. According to Behrman and Perreault (1984), performance is measured on two
domains, behavioural-based dimensions, e.g., absenteeism, satisfaction and motivation;
and outcome-based dimensions e.g., sales and targets achievements (Anderson and
Oliver, 1987; Cravens et al., 1993; Oliver and Anderson, 1994). According to Locke
(1976), the satisfaction is defined as “a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting
from the appraisal of one’s job or job experiences” (p.1304).
According to Singh et al. (1994), there is a negative relationship between the
salespeople’s performance and burnout. These results were drawn while taking
behaviour-based indicators of performance. The behaviour and outcome-based
dimensions of performance are interrelated to each other; they have positive relationship
with each other. Thus, burnout and performance are negatively related to each other
(Babakus et al., 1996; Cravens et al., 1993) Employees feeling burn out may not perform
well, because they have to address the issues regarding their emotional and professional
feelings.
According to Keaveney and Nelson (1993), intrinsically motivated employees are in a
better position to tackle the problems arising in the environment. Employees become
psychologically strong and do well in this dimension of behavioural factors. They can
decide effectively to handle unpredictable problems surfaced in the working environment
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 93

which lowers their burnout level. Therefore, it is expected that employees having high
level of intrinsic motivation will not face burnout as compared to the employees having
lower level of intrinsic motivation. The relationship is twofold as intrinsic motivation
may also affect the burnout level, but burnout severely affects the intrinsic motivation of
the employees.
According to Smyth and Murphy (1969), the factors which motivate employees in
sales department may not attract or motivate the employees working in different setup, as
salespeople are more attracted towards monetary benefits. A positive relationship is also
explored between intrinsic motivation and job performance of the salespeople (Miao and
Evans, 2007). According to Mulki et al. (2007), intrinsic motivation has a positive impact
on job performance of employees. Deci and Ryan (1985) demonstrated positive
relationship between intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. Keaveney and Nelson
(1993) demonstrated a positive impact of intrinsic motivation on the satisfaction of the
employees.
A satisfied worker always yields maximum and optimal results in the field and give
maximum performance. However, there are mixed views about the relationship between
job satisfaction and performance of the employees. Singh et al. (1994) demonstrated a
positive relationship, but not a significant one, hence equated it to have no relationship
between these two variables. However, a significant positive relationship is explored in
various studies. According to Babakus et al. (1996) there is a positive relationship
between performance and job satisfaction of the employees.
There are three main kind of factors which are causing burnout in employees, i.e.,
job, role and organisational related factors or stressors (Cordes and Dougherty, 1993).
Frequent interactions with the external stakeholders of the organisation including
employees make these employees emotionally exhausted (Maslach, 1978). According to
another study conducted by Maslach et al. (2001) there are some factors, which are
controlled by the organisations, i.e., related to the reward and punishment policies thereof
are also affecting employees’ burnout. Role conflict has a negative impact on the
employee’s job satisfaction (Gila and Acker, 2004). There is a general conception that the
organisational design has an impact on the role ambiguity and role conflict (Rizzo et al.,
1970). The conflicts arise by the complicated chain of command, whether the chain of
command has a unity or having multifaceted. The multifaceted characteristics of the
chain of command result in these two kinds of role related problems. They further quoted
the theory of the organisation that the unity of command should be adopted to keep them
safe from problems of role conflict and role ambiguity. According to Gila and Acker
(2004) employees working in service oriented organisations feel diminished job
satisfaction when they face role ambiguity.
Gila and Acker (2004) empirically demonstrated a positive relationship between role
conflict and role ambiguity an employee is facing and his intention to leave the
organisation. Organisations following unity of command in the organisational structure
don’t face such problems. Conflicting commands from various sources of authorities
make the employees vulnerable to feel dissatisfaction with their jobs due to incompetency
to fulfil conflicting orders from multi-sources. This dissatisfaction persuades them to
leave the organisation. According to Miller (2010), employees’ intention to leave the
organisation results in brain drain in the organisation in the form of loss of
competitiveness and innovative capabilities in the organisation. This turnover forces the
organisation to search for the alternatives to fill the gap of the skilled and efficient
94 W.U. Rehman et al.

workers in the organisation, which costs the organisation more than when it retains the
employees by applying some motivational techniques (Abbasi et al., 2008). Galletta et al.
(2011) empirically demonstrated negative impact of intrinsic motivation, though some
other variables, on the intention of the employee to leave the organisation. According to
van Scotter et al. (2000), leave intention and job performance of the employees working
in the sales industry are negatively related to each other. Satisfaction is equally important
for both the employees as well as the organisation. This is the reason when many
researchers argued that the more the employee is satisfied the more will be his chances
that he will stay with the organisation (see: Acker, 1999; Oberlander, 1990). According to
Cordes and Dougherty (1993), the individual’s demographic variables, i.e., age, gender
and tenure are some variables, which increase vulnerability of the employees towards
burnout. These factors also affect different people in different manner and are also helpful
in differentiating between the employees who are to be affected by them and result in
burnout and others who are not sensitive towards these factors.

2.1 Theoretical framework

The model identification also involves the relationships and directions of these
relationship between the variables selected for the study. Therefore, a self-explanatory
Table 1 enlists the variables and their relationships with each other. These relationships
are pointed out in the light of the previous researches.
Table 1 Direction of the relationship between the variables selected for this study

Variable 1 Variable 2 Direction Support

Burnout Performance (H1) Negative Craven et al. (1993) and
Babakus et al. (1996)
Intrinsic motivation (H2) Negative Keaveney and Nelson (1993)
Performance Intrinsic motivation (H3) Positive Mulki et al. (2007)
Job satisfaction (H5) Positive Babakus et al. (1996)
Intention to leave (H11) Negative van Scotter et al. (2000)
Role conflict Job satisfaction (H^) Negative Gila and Acker (2004)
Intention to leave (H8) Positive Gila and Acker (2004)
Intrinsic Job satisfaction (H4) Positive Keaveney and Nelson (1993)
motivation
Intention to leave (H10) Negative Galletta et al. (2011)
Job satisfaction Intention to leave (H12) Negative Acker (1999) and
Oberlander (1990)
Role ambiguity (H7) Negative Gila and Acker (2004)
Role ambiguity Intention to leave (H9) Positive Gila and Acker (2004)
Notes: The third column represents the nature of relationship between the variables
mentioned in column one and two. Based on the literature review, hypotheses
were developed and the hypothesised relationships between the variables are
defined in the table. The last column represents the literature support for
developed of relevant hypothesis
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 95

Figure 1 Thematic diagram of the model

Source: Low et al. (2001), Maslach and Jackson (1981), Cravens et al. (1993),
Behrman and Perreault (1984), Anderson and Oliver (1987), Oliver
and Anderson (1994), Churchill et al. (1974) and researcher’s own
processing

3 Research methodology

The extent of researcher was minimal, i.e., distribution and collection of the
questionnaires from the respondents. Cross-sectional data was collected from the sales
officers of the branches of different banks operating in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Data
was collected in non-contrived setting. Convenience sampling technique was applied to
collect the data for the study due to the following reasons: non-availability of sampling
frame, which is a necessary and must condition for simple random sampling technique.
The convenience sampling technique is both cost and time efficient method of data
collection where random sampling is not possible. Sales officers from different banks
were studied to test the hypotheses formulated for the study. The questionnaires were
distributed among 500 sales officers of the banks located in Rawalpindi and Islamabad. A
total of 367 questionnaires were received out of which 322 questionnaires were
operational as were completely filled by the respondents and were found to be flawless in
all respect. However, 45 questionnaires were non-operational due to missing values and
hence not included in the study.
158 of the respondents were from local banks; however, the rest of 164 respondents
were working in foreign banks. Information regarding origin of the banks was taken from
the State Bank of Pakistan. A previous study conducted by Akhtar (2002) was consulted
for the ascertainment of the origin of the banks. He also used SBP Report (2001) for the
identification of the origin of the banks operating in Pakistan.

3.1 Instruments for data collection

The first part solicited demographic information of the respondents. The second part
consists of the variables, for which the already developed tools were adopted and detailed
in Table 2:
96 W.U. Rehman et al.

Table 2 Tools used to measure the construct

Cronbach’s
Construct Source Examples
alpha
Burnout Maslach and Jackson 0.97 I feel emotionally drained
22 items (1981) from my work
(Strongly disagree
to strongly agree)
Performance Cravens et al. (1993) 0.97 Achieving annual sales
Nine items and Behrman and targets and other objectives
Perreault (1984)
(Needs
improvement to
outstanding)
Intrinsic motivation Anderson and 0.97 My job increases my feeling
Four items Oliver (1987) and of self-esteem
Cravens et al. (1993)
(strongly agree to
strongly disagree)
Job satisfaction Churchill et al. (1974) 0.99 The company has an unfair
Total 28 promotion policy

(Strongly disagree
to strongly agree)
Role conflict Johnston et al. (1990) 0.95 I receive an assignment
Eight items and Rizzo et al. (1970) without sufficient resources

(Never to always)
Role ambiguity Johnston et al. (1990) 0.96 My job doesn’t have clear,
Six items and Rizzo et al. (1970) planned goals and
objectives
(Never to always)
Intention to leave Bluedorn (1982) and 0.93 My chances to leave the
Four items Johnston et al. (1990) organisation in next three
months are?
(Very low to very
high)
Note: For job satisfaction (which has seven different dimensions to measure satisfaction
like with job, co-workers, customers, etc.) has 28 items in total
Statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software version 16.0 was used to carry out
the analysis. After collection of the data the reliability of the scales was measured through
Cronbach’s alpha reliability test in SPSS, which is given in the Table 2. According to
Nunnally (1978, p. 245) guidelines the scales are reliable with Cronbach’s alpha value of
0.70 or above. Therefore, the scales employed in the current study are reliable having
Cronbach’s alpha values between 0.925 and 0.987. The values of skewness and kurtosis
all the variables have values of kurtosis and skewness less than absolute value of 1 i.e.,
+/–1, except for role ambiguity which has –1.076. According to Avkiran (1995) and
Ahmad (2010), if the values of skewness and kurtosis are near to zero then the data is
considered to be normally distributed. These values of the two indicators showed that the
assumption of the normality of the data was met in the study.
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 97

4 Results

The demographic data shows, male constituted 55.3% of the total respondents, i.e.,
178 male respondents; however female constituted rest of the 44.7% of the data, i.e.,
144 female respondents. 64.9% of the respondents were single (209 respondents never
married) and 34.2% of the respondent were married (110 living married life), however
only less than 1% of the respondents were divorced (three respondents divorced). Only
3.1% of the respondents were just intermediate (have completed only 12 years of
schooling) they were only ten. Only 30.1% of the respondents were graduate, i.e.,
97 respondents. Most of the respondents were Master’s degree holders, i.e., they
constituted 65.2% of the total sample size, i.e., 210. However, only 1.6% of the
respondents were higher degree holders which were only five in numbers. There were
49.1% respondents (158 in numbers) who were working in the locally owned banks;
however, 50.9% of the respondents were working in the foreign banks (operating in
Pakistan).
The descriptive results were also used to assess the performance, burnout, job
satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, role ambiguity, role conflict and intention to leave being
experienced by the sales force. The results provided in Table 3. Four showed that the
employees performed above average (i.e., mean = 3.06 on 1–5 scale); the level of job
satisfaction of these employees was also above average, i.e., 3.16 and intrinsic motivation
was almost the same as those of performance and satisfaction, which were positive
behaviours of the employees, i.e., 3.26, the values were ranging from 3.06 to 3.26. The
results here showed that employees were facing problems of role conflict, role ambiguity,
burnout and intention to leave as the values were higher as compared to the positive
behavioural variables, i.e., burnout 3.46, role ambiguity 3.40, role conflict 3.51 and
intention to leave 3.55 ranging from 3.40 to 3.55.
Table 3 Descriptive statistics for normality test

Variable Mean S.D Skewness Kurtosis

Performance 3.06 1.24 –0.625 –0.963
Burnout 3.46 1.137 –0.245 –0.840
Job satisfaction 3.16 1.23 –0.800 –0.670
Intrinsic motivation 3.26 1.38 –0.637 –0.998
Role ambiguity 3.40 1.344 –0.413 –1.076
Role conflict 3.51 1.19 –0.370 –0.869
Intention to leave 3.55 1.21 –0.562 –0.600
Source: Field data
To test first hypothesis of the study which examined the impact of burnout on
performance of sales officers, a simple regression analysis was applied. Certain
assumptions of conducting regression analysis were satisfied before conducting
regression analysis. The assumptions were related to the normality of the data, linearity
of the relationship and equality of the variances. These assumptions were satisfied by
applying respective tests, as elaborated and demonstrated in the preceding sections that
the data was normal, which confirms that first assumption of the normality of the data.
Burnout was responsible for 32.4% change in the performance of the sales officers.
98 W.U. Rehman et al.

However, there were certain other variables, which accounts for rest of the 67.6%
variation in the performance.
Table 4 showed very strong causal relationship between burnout and performance.
The negative sign of beta indicated that burnout negatively affected the performance of
sales officers, i.e., one unit increase in the burnout would lead to 0.624 unit decrease in
performance. The estimated beta was significant at 1% level of significance as indicated
by value of p = 0.000. This was also evident from low value of standard error and high
value of t-statistic, i.e., t = –12.390.

Table 4 Coefficientsa

Unstandardised Standardised Collinearity

Model coefficients coefficients t Sig. statistics
B Std. error Beta Tolerance VIF
1 (Constant) 5.232 .184 28.478 .000
Burnout –.624 .050 –.569 –12.390 .000 1.000 1.000
a
Note: Dependent variable: performance
Source: Regression analysis on field data

4.1 Mediating role of intrinsic motivation

To assess the mediating role of intrinsic motivation on the burnout-performance

relationship, regression analysis was employed. The original variation explained by the
burnout in performance was 0.324 (32.4% variation explained in performance by
burnout). The model summary also included the second model (after inclusion of
satisfaction, intention to leave, role conflict and intrinsic motivation in the original
burnout-performance model).
The new model showed R2 value of .821, which means that the independent variables
included in the model were responsible for 82.1% variation in performance of the sales
officers (R2 = 0.821). Both of the models were good models to predict performance of the
sales officers (F = 153.506, p = 0.000 for model 1) and (F = 289.723, p = 0.000 for
model 2).
Table 5 included all the standardised coefficients of the independent variables. The
table showed that there was no significant impact of burnout on the performance when
the other variables were included in the model (coefficient = –0.040, p = 0.411). The
coefficient of the burnout was –0.040, which was very low from its original value of
–0.569, which implies that individually the burnout’s coefficient was high as compared to
its impact in the presence of other variables, i.e., satisfaction, intrinsic motivation,
intention to leave and role conflict.
It was demonstrated by the regression analysis of the model that there was a
mediating role of intrinsic motivation, satisfaction, intention to leave and role conflict;
hence the null hypothesis regarding no mediating role of intrinsic motivation was
rejected, as the standardised beta coefficient of burnout decreased from –0.569 to –0.40.
The other variable which was also not significantly affecting performance of sales
officers was the intention to leave (coefficient = –0.029, p = 0.476).
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 99

Table 5 Coefficientsa

Unstandardised Standardised
Collinearity statistics
Model coefficients oefficients t Sig.
B Std. error Beta Tolerance VIF
1 (Constant) 5.232 .184 28.478 .000
Burnout –.624 .050 –.569 –12.390 .000 1.000 1.000
2 (Constant) .140 .204 .685 .494
Burnout –.043 .053 –.040 –.824 .411 .245 4.081
Intrinsic .256 .055 .284* 4.681 .000 .154 6.509
motivation
Satisfaction .649 .060 .644* 10.870 .000 .161 6.203
Role conflict .086 .050 .082** 1.720 .086 .249 4.020
Leave –.030 .042 –.029 –.713 .476 .348 2.871
intention
Notes: aDependent variable: performance,
*Significant at 1% significance level,
**Significant at 10% significant level
Source: Regression analysis on field data
The probable reason of this could be that burnout and stress felt by the sales officers,
when they were satisfied and intrinsically motivated; the burnout would not have much
affected their performance.

4.2 Correlation matrix (for hypotheses 3 through 12)

Results showed that there is a significant positive relationship between intrinsic
motivation and job performance; hence the hypotheses 3 to 12 are accepted (see
Appendix for correlation matrix). The result shows that all the relationships hypothesised
for this study are significant. Results showed that intrinsically motivated sales officers
concentrate on their performance rather than other irrelevant issues. By yielding
maximum output they feel internally satisfied. Sales officers become satisfied when they
are provided sufficient resources to perform their jobs in the organisation. There are
certain reasons the sales officers performs well in the organisation, the first and important
variable which affects the performance of the sales officers is the satisfaction level of the
sales officers. The results showed that the more the sales officers were satisfied the more
they performed in the organisation. The results were also correct in reverse direction, as if
sales officers perform well and yield maximum output, he will be satisfied from the
performance and the satisfaction serves as a catalyst, in further satisfaction and
performance relationship.
Receiving instructions from multi-sources regarding assignment of the jobs make
them in haphazard situation regarding performance of such tasks. Multi-sources expect
performance of a single job by their own ways, which is not possible under such
circumstances, where sufficient facilities to perform the job are lacking. The fear in the
mind of the sales officers regarding evaluation of their performance (keeping in mind
more than one reporting channel) dissatisfy them from the presence of hurdles in the
working conditions like the role conflict and role ambiguity. Lack of performance and
100 W.U. Rehman et al.

other interests in their jobs decreases the satisfaction level of the sales officers. Role
ambiguity is one of the major variables which cause the sales officers feel anxiety about
their jobs descriptions. The lack of clarity in the job description creates great anxiety
about the job in sales officers. Employees facing such problems concentrate on the
clarification of the job description and hence vulnerable to deviate from their original job
assignments. The clear understanding of the job description makes the employees to
concentrate on their performance instead of endeavours to make their job description
clear from the management. Lack of performance and other interests in their jobs
decreases the satisfaction level of the employees.
Role ambiguity is one of the major variables which cause the sales officers feel
anxiety about their jobs descriptions. The lack of clarity in the job description creates
great anxiety about the job in sales officers. Sales officers facing such problems
concentrate on the clarification of the job description and hence vulnerable to deviate
from their original job assignments. The uncertainty in the job assignments surfaces their
intention to leave the organisation. The clear understanding of the job description makes
the sales officers to concentrate on their performance instead of endeavours to make their
job description clear from the management. This negative relationship between the
intrinsic motivation and intention to leave the organisation implies that once a sales
officer becomes intrinsically de-motivated, his desire to leave the organisation would
increase. The relationship may work reverse, as if intention in a sales officer to leave the
organisation is increased he would no more remain motivated to work in that very same
set up, unless there are drastic changes occurred in the organisational set up, which
caused him de-motivate. The job satisfaction and intention to leave were negatively and
significantly related to each other. The results showed that the sales officers not satisfied
from their working environment, co-workers and the compensatory system of the banks,
were more inclined to leave the organisation.

5 Discussion

The descriptive statistics showed that the average values of the performance, intrinsic
motivation and job satisfaction were lower as compared to the burnout, role conflict, role
ambiguity and intention to leave. This difference showed that the sales officers were more
stressed, due to the increased level of role conflict and role ambiguity, which compelled
them to deflate their motivation, satisfaction and performance level. The sales officers
scored high value on intention to leave (i.e., 3.55), which means they were so depressed
that they were intending to leave the organisation. The results showed that sales officers
were facing problems of role conflict, role ambiguity, burnout and intention to leave, as
the values were higher as compared to the positive behavioural variables, i.e., burnout
3.46, role ambiguity 3.40, role conflict 3.51 and intention to leave 3.55 ranging from
3.40 to 3.55.
Through results of simple regression analysis it was concluded that burnout has a
negative impact on the performance of the sales officers, burnout alone was responsible
for 33% variation in the performance of the sales officers, however, the performance was
also subject to some other variables, which were also analysed for their contribution
towards performance. These results also validated the relationship between the burnout
and performance as demonstrated by Cravens et al. (1993) and Babakus et al. (1996) in
their respective studies.
 Impact of burnout on employees’ performance 101

After inclusion of other variables in the model, it was assessed that the variables
included in the model were responsible for 82% variation in the performance of the sales
officers. However, inclusion of these variables mediated the impact of burnout on the
performance. The burnout’s coefficient, when it was taken alone, was high as compared
to its impact in the presence of other variables, i.e., satisfaction, intrinsic motivation,
intention to leave and role conflict. These results imply that burnout-performance
relationship was affected by other variables, such as intrinsic motivation. In the presence
of intrinsic motivation in the sales officer reduces the impact of burnout on the
performance. The more the sales officer will be intrinsically motivated the lesser will the
impact of burnout on the performance.
According to Keaveney and Nelson (1993), intrinsically motivated employees are in a
better position to tackle the problems arising in the environment. The results of the
current research also showed the same results as demonstrated by Keaveney and Nelson
(1993). Intrinsically motivated sales officer may still feel burnout but the former does not
let the latter affect his performance. The results also demonstrated the positive
relationship between the motivation, satisfaction and performance of the sales officers.
However, the same results were explored by Smyth and Murphy (1969). The results of
the current study also validate the results demonstrated by Miao and Evans (2007) and
Mulki et al. (2007) who also demonstrated a positive impact of the intrinsic motivation
on the performance of the employees.
However, in the presence of the role conflict and role ambiguity employees
concentrate on overcoming these two problems and were detracted from their sole
objectives of the performance. They were not clear about their targets, because they were
working in a dynamic environment where rapid changes occur. The results of the current
study are in conformation with the results of the previous studies, e.g., according to
Cordes and Dougherty (1993), Rizzo et al. (1970) and Maslach (1978) role conflict and
role ambiguity affects the satisfaction level of the employees in negative direction. Gila
and Acker (2004) also demonstrated a negative impact of the role conflict and role
ambiguity on the satisfaction of the employees. To overcome such problems, the sales
department of the banks in collaboration with the HR departments of the banks should
formulate clear job description of the sales force to avoid role ambiguity. The
management should specify a single and clear chain of command so that there should be
no duplication of instruction from the superiors to the sales officers to avoid role
conflicts. Furthermore, the target assigned to the sales officers should be based on reality,
i.e., the targets should be achievable within the time limit provided to the sales officers.
Lastly, incentives should be rationalised, to encourage the high performers to yield more
performance in the forthcoming assignments. In addition to that, the targets for the sales
officers should also be rationalised keeping in view the gender, age and tenure of the
sales officers.
Female sales officers, since they are not comfortable in making outdoor visits, should
be given targets according to their willingness to pay outdoor visits. Furthermore, policies
should be formulated to give maximum chances to the female married sales officers to
serve indoor assignments, like telemarketing, telesales and etc. The working environment
should be developed which should attract both male and female to work in, where gender
discrimination at work place should be minimum. Management of the banks should
formulate policies for rewarding the performers in order to avoid their intention to leave
the jobs. The pay and reward structure of other sales oriented organisations should be
102 W.U. Rehman et al.

studied to implement for retaining the human assets in the organisation. The management
should not assign targets without prior sufficient trainings to the new entrants. As soon as
they enter the organisation they are assigned the targets, which are even high for the
experienced sales officers. The management should introduce a weekly programme for
the sensitisation of the new products introduced by the banks. Lack of knowledge
regarding own product embarrassing the sales officers, which is ultimate source of stress
and burnout.
Once a sales officer is dissatisfied, less motivated and facing problems of role conflict
and role ambiguity, he may not perform his job well, which compels him to leave the
organisation to join such organisation, where he can avoid these problems in discharging
his duties and yielding maximum performance. These results validate the results yielded
by Acker (1999) and Oberlander (1990), who also asserted that less satisfied employee
tends to leave the organisation which subsequently deteriorate the performance of the
employee.

6 Conclusions

The burnout level of the sales officers was high as compared to the performance of the
sales officers which means the sales officers’ performance was affected by the level of the
burnout they faced. The satisfaction level was also less than the burnout experienced by
the sales officers which hindered performance and deflate the satisfaction level of the
sales officers. The highest value of intention to leave indicated that the sales officers were
fed up from the presence of role conflict and role ambiguity contributing towards
burnout. Indeed the role conflict and role ambiguity played a vital role in the burnout and
intention of the sales officers to leave the organisation. Interestingly, burnout level has
minimal effect on the performance of intrinsically motivated sales officers. Despite
interesting findings, this study suffers from few limitations such as size of sample of the
study in which only 15 local banks and only four foreign banks were included. Therefore,
in future study more banks from different cities can be included for the purpose of
generalisation. Moreover, future research may be replicated in other sales oriented
industries and cross comparison can be made. As a research implication, the difference of
the performance, burnout, intrinsic motivation level of employees may be examined with
respect to the origin and size of the bank, tenure, age and gender of employees.

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Appendix

Correlation matrix – relationship between variables

Intrinsic Intention Role Role
Performance Burnout Satisfaction
motivation to leave conflict ambiguity
Performance
Sig. (two-tailed)
N
Burnout –.569**
Sig. (two-tailed) .000
N 322
Intrinsic .864** –.636**
motivation
Sig. (two-tailed) .000 .000
N 322 322
Satisfaction .899** –.614** .912**
Sig. (two-tailed) .000 .000 .000
N 322 322 322
Intention to leave –.492** .761** –.529** –.538**
Sig. (two-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000
N 322 322 322 322
Role conflict –.493** .835** –.592** –.546** .773**
Sig. (two-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000
N 322 322 322 322 322
Role ambiguity –.538** .868** –.606** –.568** .730** .857**
Sig. (two-tailed) .000 .000 .000 .000 .000 .000
N 322 322 322 322 322 322
Note: *All the values are significant at 0.01 level of significance.

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