Module 7 Outline: Personal (Psychological and Social) Resources Protecting Public Health Workers from Burnout

Expanding on what you have learned so far in this training, this module focuses on personal resources. We will break them down into those that are more psychological and social in nature. These internal and interpersonal resources can be extremely powerful for combating burnout.
You will notice that the content in this module will mirror many of the demands covered in Module 5. However, personal resources tend to have a much wider-ranging impact than just for addressing personal demands.
The content we cover in this module will help you to recognize psychological and social forms of resources. Your workers need these resources to work well, especially when demands are high.
For the overall structure of this module, we will focus on…
1. Why psychological and social resources matter, and
2. Examples of psychological and social resources.

In previous modules of this training, we defined resources as anything that helps us meet demands. As you learned in Module 6, some resources can be practical and tangible, physical and environmental aspects of work. Many other critical resources, however, are less tangible. They take the form of personal psychological states or social relationships and connections. These types of personal resources are our focus in this module.
Psychological resources are resources that come from you. That can be your mood, your personality traits, your energy, or your beliefs about yourself and the world around you. This is not to say that personal resources are solely determined by the individual. For instance, your organizational environment can obviously affect your mood and energy.
Social resources come from the beneficial aspects of interacting with others. While other people can be one of our greatest demands, positive relationships can be one of our most powerful resources.
Similar to when we talked about demands in Modules 4 and 5, psychological and social resources are closely related and often have blurred boundaries. Because of this overlap we will use the term psychosocial resources at times to describe both psychological and social resources.
1. For example, our personal perception that social support from others is available can be a powerful resource, even if no one is actively doing something to help us.
Before we dig into specific examples of important personal resources for public health workers, we want to first talk about why these psychosocial resources are so important for preventing and responding to burnout.

While physical and environmental resources (as discussed in Module 6) often help us respond to specific types of demands, many personal resources have much broader relevance, utility, and value.
Some psychosocial resources help reduce burnout risk by directly helping us meet a fairly specific demand.
1. For instance, when faced with a challenging task, our own self-confidence can help us to get started. Or, when faced with a time-consuming task, a co-worker may help you to complete it.
Other personal resources have more generalizable and often long-lasting utility and value for preventing burnout.
Referencing those gain and loss cycles we have talked about before, some personal resources help us by increasing our resource pool. They can also help protect our resource pool from quick and drastic losses. This reduces our risk for burnout.
Here are a couple of examples we’ve heard from public health workers that really help to illustrate the broad utility of personal resources:
1. First, as a social resource example, consider access to a supportive leader. This type of leader might demonstrate support in many ways, including encouraging their employees to take breaks when needed. This small but important action then helps these employees feel empowered to take breaks, which helps them replenish energy and focus.
2. As a second, more psychological example, consider a public health worker who works closely with people who have experienced trauma. This public health worker faces some serious emotional demands in the course of their daily work. However, this worker finds personal meaning in their work and feels they are gifted in this role. Personal value and belief in yourself can help you meet tough demands.
Several psychosocial resources are especially influential because they are linked to our basic human needs. Psychologists that study intersections between motivation and well-being have identified several core needs that drive us. These needs can be met by or experienced as a part of some psychosocial resources (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Van den Broeck et al., 2011). We will talk about four examples.
1. Competence – quite simply, we like to be good at what we do. Public health workers are very driven in their work. These workers are going to feel motivated when using their unique skillsets and when appreciated for those skills.
2. Significance – we want to see the value in what we’re doing. We want the things we do to “count” for something, such as contributing to the greater good or helping others. Some workers feel this sense of significance on their own. Others can benefit from social supports who help them to see the importance of what they’re doing.
3. Autonomy or Control – we generally want to have at least some control over what’s happening to us. Public health workers are well-aware of the challenges of diminished control when a crisis occurs and is rapidly changing. Our psychological resources like optimism and being able to focus on what we can do to make a situation better, can help. These resources can give us some semblance of control in chaotic situations.
4. Relatedness or belongingness – we have a basic desire to be connected with other people. This is why those social resources, like support, are important in meeting our basic needs and allowing us to meet demands.
With these mechanisms in mind, we will now walk through some more specific examples of psychosocial resources that can be impactful for public health workers. We will start with more psychological resources and work our way to social resources. That said, some of the resources we talk about share some psychological and social influences.

Researchers have extensively studied personal psychological traits and characteristics that help us respond to demanding situations. It is impossible to summarize all of the literature in this brief module so we will focus instead on several key psychological resources that are important to public health workers.
1. Some of these resources are grounded in or connected to personality differences that can be difficult to change.
2. Increasing evidence suggests, however, that people can learn many of the beneficial cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of these traits through training.
3. Thus, it is important to understand and account for what we know about psychological differences in burnout intervention efforts.
Resilience is a fairly broad term, often used to indicate a person’s ability to sustain themselves and “bounce back” in the face of adversity. This has become an important topic for public health workers since the pandemic, with the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) even developing a public health worker resilience resource library, which we linked in our supplemental materials.
1. Several studies, including among civil servants and healthcare workers, find that resilience is a psychological resource that protects against burnout (Di Monte et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2022).
2. There are several different conceptualizations of what resilience is, but most people agree that it is not just one simple innate quality (e.g., Richardson, 2002).
3. More resilient individuals do, however, tend to differ from less resilient individuals in their access and ability to effectively use resources. This has led to interventions that successfully trained people to foster and sustain positive emotions. Participants also learned how to establish and sustain positive connections with social resources.
We want to be clear that resilience, and really all the personal resources we emphasize in this training, still operate in a broader context, as part of the organizational systems in which we work. Even the most resilient individuals can burn out when faced with chronic and excessive demands. In other words, just encouraging workers to be more resilient is not a solution to addressing burnout.
Optimism is often considered a component to resilience. It is associated with an overall positive disposition toward looking for the “good” in situations.
1. Optimism is not simply a set of rose-colored glasses through which one sees a skewed version of reality. Instead, it is the ability to positively adapt and try to focus on where you can improve your situation (Forgeard & Seligman, 2012). This ability to focus on how to improve a situation is one way that optimism can be extremely helpful to workers who face high demands.
2. Optimism can help reduce our health risks and generally help us feel more resourced. This can help protect us from burnout (Barkhuizen et al., 2014).
Sense of Coherence focuses on our ability to generally make sense of our reality. People with a stronger sense of coherence are able to view the world as meaningful, comprehensible, and manageable (Antonovsky, 1987).
1. Studies have linked sense of coherence to lower levels of burnout symptoms (SÖderfeldt et al., 2000; Stoyanova & Stoyanov, 2021).
Related to coherence, finding meaning in work is particularly important to building and sustaining our health and well-being. People who view their work as meaningful or who feel called to their profession often experience less burnout and more positive work outcomes (Allan et al., 2018; Hu & Hirsh, 2017).
1. The 2022 Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey found that 94% of public health workers surveyed felt the work they do is important. 93% were determined to give their best every day. This tells us that seeing meaning or purpose in work is an important resource that many public health workers already have at their disposal. Supervisors play an important role in ensuring that those who are most connected to their work are also taking time to recharge and replenish resources needed to meet their demands.
Gratitude can also be a part of someone’s natural disposition or a regular practice of showing thankfulness.
1. Studies show gratitude can be especially helpful for those who face difficult emotional demands (Guan & Jepsen, 2020). It’s also helpful for those who may not regularly face such demands at work.
  1. One recent study found that gratitude may reduce burnout at work by encouraging helping behaviors (Kersten et al., 2022). In other words, those who are grateful at work are more likely to be helpful coworkers. This helps them further create a rich network of personal and social resources.
  2. Gratitude-based interventions are actually one of the more common intervention strategies that researchers have used in burnout-prone professions (e.g., nurses, teachers).
Having compassion and empathy are additional helpful psychological resources.
1. We usually focus on compassion as an outward expression of care, but we can also direct such compassion and grace to ourselves. Self-compassion involves being open, kind, and nonjudgmental toward yourself and your own inadequacies (Neff, 2003).
2. Compassion and empathy are important resources when we leverage them to build resources (e.g., finding personal meaning, protecting our sense of worth).
Self-efficacy is our belief in our own abilities to have control over challenging demands. Self-efficacy is related to less burnout risk (Shoji et al., 2016).
1. Some people tend to have higher self-efficacy overall, but this can fluctuate to some degree over time and across situations.
2. A strong sense of self-efficacy directly goes against one aspect of burnout – negative or cynical attitude or feeling like you are not being effective at work. Self-efficacy can also empower us to pursue more active methods of coping with our problems versus feeling helpless.
3. We do want to clarify that self-efficacy does not mean being unrealistic. In fact, it is important to be able to clearly acknowledge demands that exceed a worker’s abilities or control.
4. Supervisors can play an important role in both encouraging confidence in workers’ abilities and also protecting workers from experiencing self-blame when demands do become extremely challenging and possibly uncontrollable.
Several other common psychological resources tend to fluctuate a little more based on our situation or context. Specifically:
1. Positive emotions tend to coincide with many of the personality traits we talked about already. Speaking more broadly, positive emotions tend to be beneficial for health and protective against burnout. Positive emotions help with our ability to cope with stressors (Tugade et al., 2004) and also help us think more creatively and flexibly about our work (Fredrickson, 2000).
2. Our personal energy is another key resource. To put it simply, the state of our overall health is a personal resource we cannot neglect. Just think about how you feel when you can prioritize good sleep, eating well, and taking time for exercise. When our body’s basic needs are taken care of, it often feels easier to meet demands that come up.
  1. 1. Unfortunately, we have tendencies to get into some self-undermining cycles during stressful times. For instance, when you have high demands, what are the ways you typically respond? Most of us are not opting for a kale salad and an hour-long exercise routine. During high stress, you might be sleeping less, grabbing fast food or skipping meals, and neglecting your exercise routine. We also tend to take fewer restorative breaks when we have high stress.
    2. Quite simply, we need our physical and energetic resource tanks full in order to meet demands. And we must make sure those tanks are refilled if we want to avoid running out of fuel – which over time, can be experienced as burnout.

1. 1. Shifting our focus a bit, we will now discuss important resources that come from our social context, connections, and community (Hobfoll, 2001; Hobfoll, 2002). Compared to the large number of psychological factors studied, the social factors affecting burnout really come down to a couple of key resources.
  2. First, our individual social standing is a socially determined condition that functions as a resource (Hobfoll, 1989). The desirability of a social status, like being married, being a parent, belonging to a professional organization, or being in a leadership position, can vary from situation to situation. Generally, any given social status can be a resource if it helps to meet demands.
    1. As one practical example, your status as a leader, manager, or supervisor is a resource. It grants you some degree of influence over others and access to other resources to use at your discretion.
  3. Second, our social networks and support systems play crucial roles, directly affecting our health and well-being. They also indirectly facilitate access to other valuable resources.
    1. These more relational resources come from a variety of sources – friends and family outside of work, co-workers and supervisors in the workplace, a professional or personal mentor, and even interactions with the community.
  4. Valuable resources that emerge from our connections and relationships include information, affirmation, connection, and support.
    1. Starting with information, our social resources can be valuable sources of information. Simply working with others grants access to a wealth of resources in their experiences, feedback, and perspectives. All of this can help us with sense-making and problem-solving.
    2. Concerning affirmation, our interactions with others help to highlight what we are doing right and to normalize our experiences and expectations. We often learn about ourselves and make sense of ourselves with the help of others.
      1. Receiving feedback from others about the work we do is actually one of several core factors that create motivating work. When we know we are doing something right (or wrong), it helps us understand the outcomes of our work and makes it matter to us more (Hackman & Oldham, 1976).
      2. Affirmation is directly linked to other psychosocial resources already mentioned, like self-efficacy and meaning. For instance, one public health worker we interviewed talked about how encouraging it was when they received letters from their community during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some public health workers felt that frontline healthcare workers were getting the spotlight. When they did get some recognition from their community, it was extremely motivating!
    3. When it comes to interpersonal connection, we highlighted at the beginning of this module that one of our fundamental human needs is to feel connected to other people and like we belong.
      1. Trends towards isolation and loneliness are a continuing serious public health threat (Holt-Lunstad, 2017).
      2. Close interpersonal connections protect us from loneliness. These connections can also help us to process and make sense of complex work demands or situations.
      3. Having close connections also makes it more likely that you have someone who can step in and help you if you need it. Those close connections may recognize when your demands are especially high because they are familiar with you and the work you do.
    4. Finally, support from others is a broadly valuable and important function of social resources. We think social support is so important that we focus on it as a key intervention element in later modules of this series. For now, though, a couple of key points should be noted (both are discussed more, later in this training series):
      1. First, as a leader, supervisor, or manager, you probably have more authority to help workers obtain and use the resources they may need to meet essential work demands. This might include access to physical equipment, flexibility in scheduling, or different allocation of staff. You can also provide much needed emotional support to workers who just need to know someone cares.
      2. Second, practical efforts to improve social support may take the form of mentorship programs, social support groups, or simply intentional interpersonal connections at work. For instance, some healthcare facilities have set aside time for peers to connect, reflect on positive stories, or collectively process ongoing challenges.
  5. While we have only scratched the surface of some powerful psychological and social resources in this brief module, we hope you can appreciate how critical they are to the functioning of public

How do we apply this? As we noted earlier in this module, although many of these personal resources seem to be more up to the individual, there is some really strong evidence that both psychological and social resources can be increased through interventions.
All leaders, supervisors, and managers can help other workers to foster and display optimism, self-compassion, self-efficacy, and many other desirable attitudes.
The social forms of these resources are particularly important for leaders, supervisors, or managers to understand. You can directly help to increase and improve everyone’s access to social resources by fostering work experiences characterized by social connection, appreciation, and support.
We will get into specific strategies in later modules, but for now, we want you to remember that fostering personal and social resources is not just up to an individual on their own.
We look forward to sharing additional practical guidance and tools along those lines in upcoming modules.
Here is a quick reminder of the other content covered in this training course. We hope you find this information helpful and that you will take the time to review additional modules.

References

Allan, B. A., Batz-Barbarich, C., Sterling, H. M., & Tay, L. (2018). Outcomes of meaningful work: A meta‐analysis. Journal of Management Studies, 56(3), 500-528. https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12406

Antonovsky, A. (1987). Unraveling the Mystery of Health. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

Barkhuizen, N., Rothmann, S., & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2014). Burnout and work engagement of academics in higher education institutions: Effects of dispositional optimism. Stress and Health, 30(4), 322-332. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2520

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Deci, E., & Ryan, R. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01

Di Monte, C., Monaco, S., Mariani, R., & Di Trani, M. (2020). From resilience to burnout: Psychological features of Italian general practitioners during COVID-19 emergency. Front Psychol, 11, 567201. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.567201

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Feng, Y., Li, F., & Sun, H. (2022). A study on the relationship between self-efficacy, psychological resilience, and job burnout of grassroots civil servants: The moderating role of the big five personality traits. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 64(10), 889-895. https://doi.org/10.1097/JOM.0000000000002600

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Hobfoll, S. E. (2001). The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress process: Advancing Conservation of Resources theory. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 50(3), 337-370. https://doi.org/Doi 10.1111/1464-0597.00062

Hobfoll, S. E. (2002). Social and psychological resources and adaptation. Review of General Psychology, 6(4), 307-324. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.6.4.307

Hobfoll, S. E., Halbesleben, J., Neveu, J.-P., & Westman, M. (2018). Conservation of Resources in the organizational context: The reality of resources and their consequences. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 5(1), 103-128. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032117-104640

Holt-Lunstad, J. (2017). The potential public health relevance of social isolation and loneliness: Prevalence, epidemiology, and risk factors. Public Policy & Aging Report, 27(4), 127-130. https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prx030

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Module 7 Outline: Personal (Psychological and Social) Resources Protecting Public Health Workers from Burnout

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