Organizational stressors and burnout in public librarians

We investigated the relationship between organizational factors and three dimensions of burnout in a sample of 53 Swedish public librarians. We also qualitatively identified specific library-related stressors based on the organizational factors investigated. The results showed that the organizational factors workload and community predicted higher levels of emotional exhaustion while the organizational factors community and values predicted higher levels of cynicism. Beyond that we also found that the most frequent stressors reported by the participants were overload of working tasks, technostress, patrons, management feedback problems and isolation. It is suggested that structural interventions to deal with burnout among librarians can be managed by both changing the work-organization and training the employees in stress-management strategies.