The role of work-related personal projects during two burnout interventions: a longitudinal study

Burnout is nowadays a common problem among employees, and a new approach to reduce its extent is needed. This study looked at burnout interventions in terms of personal goals and/or projects. These represent what individuals are striving to achieve, and include work-related goals. Our aim was to examine the extent to which two kinds of burnout intervention, in the form of different types of psychotherapy, influence employees’ personal projects. The two types of therapy were psychoanalytic and experiential, both in the form of group therapy. To determine the extent, 62 employees who had contacted the Helsinki Occupational Health Services suffering from severe burnout participated, in the course of a single year, in 16 sessions of either analytic or experiential group psychotherapy. In addition, 28 employees suffering from severe burnout served as controls. All the participants filled in Little's Personal Project Analysis and the Bergen Burnout Indicator one month before the intervention, in the middle of the intervention and one month after the intervention. The results showed that among participants in the intervention groups the level of burnout decreased. Further, the number of work-related personal projects, project-related negative emotions, and tendencies towards negative action, decreased among those in the intervention groups compared to the control group. Moreover, project-related progress, social support and managing project-related emotions increased during the intervention. Finally, the results showed that when the negative emotions related to personal projects decreased during intervention, the level of burnout also decreased.     

Developing a climate for planning

Technical advances of long range planning have been constrained by a human factor which has emerged as a planning bottleneck. The planning ‘climate’ can be a major facilitator or inhibitor of successful long range planning. Therefore the development of long range planning systems would benefit from including the planning climate as a planned systematic module in the total project. This article reports the background, contents and results of a programme for developing a proper planning climate.     

Hopes and Fears for the Future Among Chinese Adolescents

This study examined the contents of adolescents' hopes and fears for the future in a sample of 1,975 urban and rural 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in China. Chinese adolescents' hopes and fears were most often related to future education, occupation, parental well‐being, marriage and family, academics, leisure activities, wealth, interpersonal relationships, collective issues, and self‐related issues. Urban adolescents compared to rural ones reported more hopes for education and leisure activities and held fewer hopes and fears for parental well‐being and interpersonal relationships. Males reported more hopes and fears for marriage, whereas females reported more hopes and fears for parental well‐being. These results suggest the important role of the social and cultural context in adolescents' future thinking.