Chapter One literature review
1.1 Previous studies on learning burnout
In the article “Staff burnout” published in “Journal of Social Issues”,Freudenberger (1974) referred to that “The dictionary defines the verb ‘burn-out’ as‘to fail, wear out, or become exhausted by making excessive demands on energy,strength, or resources.’ And that is exactly what happens when a staff member in analternative institution burns out for whatever reasons and becomes inoperative to allintents and purposes”. It is the first time that the phenomenon of burnout wasdescribed and explained in detail.Since then, burnout research aroused researchers’ attention, and many of them putforward their own definition about burnout after study. For example, when Cherniss(1980) studied burnout of new public professionals, the phenomenon was defined as a“process in which professional’s attitudes and behaviors change in negative ways inresponse to job strain”. In 1981, Maslach and Jackson improved the definition ofburnout further as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion and cynicism that occuredfrequently among individuals who did “people-work” of some kind, and designedMaslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to measure the hypothetical aspects of burnoutsyndrome including emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, andreduced personal accomplishment. Maslach’s definition is of significance for thestudy of burnout both at home and abroad and is adopted the most widely.Recently, burnout researches boil down to both a broadening of the traditionalconcepts and scope emerged. First, the concept of burnout that is initially closelylinked to the human services such as health care, education, and social work whereemployees do “people” work of some kind, has been expanded towards all otherprofessions and occupational groups. Second, burnout research seems to shifttowards its opposite, job engagement. (Maslach et al., 2017)
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1.2 Previous studies on attribution
1.2.1 Definitions of attribution
Originally, attribution is the research field of social Psychology, and the famousAmerican psychologist Fritz Heider is its founder. In his book The Psychology ofInterpersonal Relations, he put forward the comparatively complete system ofattribution theory from the perspective of naive psychology, which marked the birthof attribution theory. Heider believed that people frequently made attributions about others andthemselves. Attributions referred to people’s explicit and implicit understanding ofthe cause of events and responsibility for the outcomes. Heider believed that peoplehad the ability to make causal inferences almost instantaneously in conjunction withtheir perception of the environment.Weiner (1985) stated that attribution referred to the process that individualsexplained and speculated the reasons of their own or another’s behavior. In Heider’ attribution theory, he divided the factors affecting people’s behaviorinto personal factors and environmental factors, i.e. internal factors and externalfactors. And he stated that people attributed his behavior either to personal reasons orto environmental reasons. Among them, the internal factors referred to the qualitiesand characteristics of individuals including emotion, ability, effort, motivation anddemand and so on. While external factors referred to the external cause of theindividual，英语论文网站，英语论文
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