Is It Just Me? Organizational Burnout and Efficacy

• In Event: Rethinking Schools in a (Post-?)Pandemic World: Innovative Conceptualizations of Schools as Organizations

Abstract

As a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and on-going gender and racial unrest, the current climate of educational leadership is marked by uncertainty, ambiguity, and distrust. School leaders the world over are reporting record levels of burnout and exhaustion. As turnover data suggests and the popular press portrays, many of the consequences of these twin crises are largely individual in nature. Certainly, this is true, individuals in leadership roles have borne the burden of decision making, change management, and crisis response in the past two year. Individual efficacy has taken a hit, as has many leaders’ sense of personal effectiveness and capability. However, we contend that organizations too, are facing heretofore under-explored challenges due to ongoing and unresolved organizational stress and tension.

Experienced as collective exhaustion, school organizations are, we argue, currently experiencing a prolonged period of disruption that has worn down/eroded the individual efforts that often hold up and sustain school-wide productivity and resilience. After years of upheaval, school organizations are experiencing a state of institutional/organizational fragility, one in which risk is high and resilience low. Moreover, we argue that at the organizational level, collective exhaustion undermines collective efficacy and has contributed to professional and personal isolation and exclusion. Due to the under-explored nature of the crises school organizations face, the field’s longstanding focus of leadership studies on systems and structures of leadership practice fails to offer an adequate response to current institution-level pressures and distress. Instead, we contend that rather than exhorting that organizations respond to unprecedented conditions by attempting to rebuild that which used to exist, we suggest that the conditions now exist for leaders to focus attentions toward the people who inhabit our school communities. Doing so, holds potential
for the rebuilding trust and safety because of explicit, deliberate and intentional practice. This article will proffer a framework that offers 1) a contemporary review of the factors and conditions that contribute to organizational-level exhaustion (e.g., collective compassion fatigue, burnout, stress/trauma) and 2) explores how school organizations may be experiencing and demonstrating exhaustion. Finally, we illustrate the potential for leadership focused on the organizational systems, structures, and relationships that prioritise care for the adults who work within them and may serve as protective and restorative strategies for the development of belonging. By doing so we recenter the discussion to highlight structures and systems that support all individuals and mitigate against relying on the good will, overwork, and determination of individuals to keep organisations afloat.

Authors

• Sharon D. Kruse, Washington State University - Vancouver
  Presenting Author

• Karen E. Edge, UCL Institute of Education
  Presenting Author