Reasons and effects of work stress on human services professionals: Disabled care centers sample

One of the important factors that may affect the perception of work life quality developed by the employees is the workload and the workload perception they develop accordingly. When the workload is more or less than necessary, it creates stress on the employees and attrition and shows various negative effects. Employees face many other difficulties in the work life, apart from the workload. These difficulties can weaken employees both in business and social life; failure, mismatch and dissatisfaction. Burnout is one of the most important of these challenges. The phenomenon of burnout, which is especially seen in professions where one-to-one interaction with people and in which emotional and intense labor and emotions are involved, consists of emotional exhaustion, feeling of personal failure and depersonalization. If burnout does not prevent, it may have psychological and physiological consequences and result in termination of work. Therefore, burnout is an important precursor in increasing the intention to leave employees as a result of being away from the organization and as a result of being interested in the work. The humanitarian service area working with disadvantaged groups constitutes one of the most sensitive occupational groups in terms of both workload and burnout. The field of disability is also accepted as a professional group at the upper limit risk within this service area. With the increasing case loadings in Turkey, the variables of workload, burnout and intention to quit have become frequently cited together for individuals serving in this field. From this point of view, the study assumes linear relationships between workload, burnout and intention to quit. In this context, a quantitative study was conducted to determine the perceptions of human service professionals working in Psycho-Social Support Services unit of Private Disability Care Centers and to determine the relationships between variables. The sample of the study consisted of 104 human service professionals randomly selected from ten different clusters from ten provinces which were formed by cluster sampling method. The results of the study, in which data were analyzed in SPSS 21 program, revealed statistically significant relationships between workload, burnout and intention to quit.