Abstract
With increasing stress and burnout accounting for depreciation in the physical and mental health of medical practitioners in hospital settings and the concomitant reduction in the level of their job performance, this paper reports on an attempt to tease out possible antecedents that give rise to burnout among 185 doctors practicing in a major hospital in the center of Israel. Based on the literature related to job performance and Hobfoll’s (2001) model of stress management – indicating that individuals cope with stress by replenishing both personal and work-related resources – we investigated the relationship between six possible input variables and burnout with a view to establishing the associations between them. The results indicated that all six possible antecedents associated with at least one of the three facets of burnout described by Maslach and Leiter (1997), namely, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal efficacy, with workload notably associating with all three criteria. The results are discussed with particular attention to practical suggestions whereby Human Resource Management in hospitals could adjust policy to ease the burden on their doctors and enhance the self- and public image of hospital practitioners.