As if it weren't hard enough already: Breaking down hiring discrimination following burnout

Disclosing the 'Big C': what does cancer survivorship signal to employers?

To study hiring discrimination against cancer survivors, we conduct a vignette experiment in which American and British professionals recruited via Prolific evaluate fictitious job candidates. Candidates differed by periods of non-employment in their career, including non-employment due to suffering from cancer. We study the effect of cancer experiences on professionals' hirability ratings, as well as its effect on underlying candidate perceptions, related to various potential forms of stigma identified in the literature. We find that employment opportunities are lower for candidates with a history of cancer, compared to candidates without such a gap. This penalty is particularly explained by perceptions that these candidates will have higher sick leave probabilities and create additional costs. However, relative to candidates with a comparable gap due to depression or personal reasons, former cancer patients are less stigmatised, with relatively favourable assessments of their emotional abilities, social abilities, motivation and positive impact on workplace culture.

Career coach preferences of medical students: coaching specialist or specialistic coach?

BACKGROUND

Medical students' demand for career coaching is growing. However, little is known about what type of career coach they prefer. Using the Warmth-Competence Framework, we investigated if and why medical students prefer physician coaches compared to career psychologist coaches. We also examined whether students' coach choice related to coaches' amount of experience with medical students.

METHODS

In a two-by-two between participants vignette study (n = 147), we manipulated coach occupational background (physician vs. psychologist) and experience with coaching medical students (limited vs. considerable). Participants read one coach description, rated the likelihood that they would choose the coach, and rated the coach on dimensions of warmth and competence.

RESULTS

Students who evaluated a physician career coach were more likely to choose the coach than students who evaluated a psychologist career coach. Students expected that a physician career coach would better understand their situation and be better able to provide career information, while they expected a psychologist career coach to have better conversation skills, all of which were relevant to choosing a coach. Coaches' experience with coaching medical students was unrelated to students' coach choice and their assessment of the coach's warmth and competence.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings highlight the relevance of coaches' occupational background and have implications for the implementation of career coach interventions. Medical schools could help students choose a career coach by providing information about the coach qualities that students value. Future studies could investigate whether career coaches with different occupational backgrounds differ in coach behaviors and coaching effectiveness.

Successful return to work after burnout: an evaluation of job, person- and private-related burnout determinants as determinants of return-to-work quality after sick leave for burnout

PURPOSE

Burnout literature has primarily studied determinants and rehabilitation. Remarkably, ways to enable qualitative return to work after burnout are considered considerably less and were studied here. Specifically, building on the Job Demands-Resources model and Effort-Recovery model, this study investigated determinants of the quality of return to work.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the quality of reintegration among 786 workers who were surveyed about their return to work after a burnout episode.

RESULTS

Restarting work at a new employer and especially getting supervisor support appeared beneficial, whereas remaining burnout symptoms, stressors in one's private environment and - mostly - neuroticism hampered the quality of return to work.

CONCLUSION

Given the high prevalence and important costs burnout entails, primary prevention alone proves insufficient. Current study findings inform on how to optimize the quality of reintegration in the workplace after a burnout episode, demonstrating that supportive managers and inclusive workplaces (i.e., open to hire applicants with a burnout history) are important levers for qualitative return to work, next to ensuring workers are not (so much) impaired by their burnout rest symptoms.Implications for RehabilitationReintegration trajectories after burnout should not only be evaluated by sick leave duration but also by the clients' subjective experience of quality of return to work.Rehabilitation professionals should ensure clients prepare return to work early so they return timely and are not (so much) impaired by their burnout rest symptoms.Rehabilitation professionals should propose reorientation towards a new employer in case of irreversible work ability problems at the current workplace.The clients' current work situation should allow for sufficient supervisor social support.Also stressors in private life (like divorce) and personality characteristics (like neuroticism) should be considered as they may hamper quality of return to work.

From Burnout to Occupational Depression: Recent Developments in Research on Job-Related Distress and Occupational Health

Job-related distress has been a focal concern in occupational health science. Job-related distress has a well-documented health-damaging and life-threatening character, not to mention its economic cost. In this article, we review recent developments in research on job-related distress and examine ongoing changes in how job-related distress is conceptualized and assessed. By adopting an approach that is theoretically, empirically, and clinically informed, we demonstrate how the construct of burnout and its measures, long favored in research on job-related distress, have proved to be problematic. We underline a new recommendation for addressing job-related distress within the long-established framework of depression research. In so doing, we present the Occupational Depression Inventory, a recently developed instrument devised to assess depressive symptoms that individuals specifically attribute to their work. We close our paper by laying out the advantages of a paradigm shift from burnout to occupational depression.