ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of the burnout concept and its relationship with health, and then their relationship to work stress. It explores a possible role for organizational healthiness in moderating the processes involved in these relationships. Burnout is used in everyday discourse as a colloquial term describing an emotionally depleted state experienced by people in the helping professions. The notion of burnout has caught the imagination of both researchers and practitioners, particularly in relation to human service occupations and the helping professions. The burnout concept was adopted from its lay use to describe a certain group of negative attitudes and emotions that human service workers held toward their jobs. For multidimensional models, burnout is a "global" term and offers an economy of description in relation to a combination of factors that relate on an additive basis: the whole is the sum of its parts.
