Role of Psychological Empowerment and Perceived Social Support in Burnout among Female College Teachers

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the role of psychological empowerment and perceived social support on the level of burnout among female college teachers. The design of the study was a correlational design and simple random sampling as well as purposive sampling techniques were used in the study. The study was conducted on 80 female college teachers (between the age range of 30 to 45 years) from various randomly selected colleges in and around Patiala, Punjab, India. The teachers were administered the Psychological Empowerment Instrument (Spreitzer, 1995), the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach, 1996) and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet & Farley, 1988) to assess their scores on the respective variables. The results indicated the component of personal accomplishment has a significant positive correlation with psychological empowerment and perceived social support. Similarly, a significant positive correlation was found between psychological empowerment and perceived social support. However, the other two component of burnout namely occupational exhaustion and depersonalization did not show any significant correlation with psychological empowerment and perceived social support. This research can help provide insights regarding successful strategies for reducing the level of burnout which contributes to the improvement of mental health.