Research pick: Sustaining the bright sparks - "Keeping the spark alive: preventing burnout at work while increasing work engagement"

Ambitious, talented, and diligent employees can suffer from burnout in any workplace. Their enthusiasm and energy can wane. Keeping the spark alive is, to a degree, the job of management hoping to retain such workers, ensure good mental health among their staff, and avoid the kind of problems that can ultimately lead to failure within or even across an organisation.

Organisations rely on the enthusiasm and engagement of their workforce for success. This puts a lot of pressure on leaders to retain talented employees and to develop this talent in new ways to encourage them to achieve the organisation’s business growth objectives. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that the spark has died a little in many organisation as employees feel increasingly burned out and disengaged from their work. This is nowhere truer than in the healthcare industry.

Writing in the International Journal of Management Practice, a team from Turkey discusses how this spark might be sustained through improved employee engagement with their work. Uğur Yozgat of Nisantasi University in İstanbul, Turkey and colleague Elif Bilginoğlu, discuss how potent leadership within an organization can light the spark in workers. The researchers also point out that the same sparking leaders can be there to help employee burnout and improve staff retention.

The team sees several practical implications of their research. Fundamentally, they say, it is the sparking leaders within an organization who must generate the energy and ignite the enthusiasm in their subordinates and so boost engagement, reduce burnout, bolster organizational morale for the mutual benefit of employees and employer.

Bilginoğlu, E. and Yozgat, U. (2020) ‘Keeping the spark alive: preventing burnout at work while increasing work engagement’, Int. J. Management Practice, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp.698–712.