Impact of adoption of yoga way of life on the reduction of job burnout of managers

Abstract

Burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. Job burn-out is a debilitating psychological condition, which has serious repercussions for an individual's personal health as also on the organizational effectiveness. The past 25 years of research has established the complexity of the construct, and has placed the individual stress experience within a larger organizational context of people's relation to their work. As a holistic science concerned with all aspects of human functioning, yogic science provides a unifying framework by which stress can be understood and eliminated. Yoga involves a systematic method by which we can begin to expand our awareness of the processes which lead to stress and thus gain control over them.

Yoga way of life has direct relevance to address the issue of stress and burnout. While several studies in the past have acknowledged this aspect and discussed various ways by which Yoga can address this aspect, till date very little effort has gone into empirically assessing the impact of Yoga way of life. The main contribution of this paper is to fill this gap. This study hypothesizes that managers who learn and adopt the Yoga way of life will be able to reduce their job burnout better than the others who engage in other things to improve their physical and mental progress. An experiment was conducted to collect data and test the hypothesis in a manufacturing unit.

The results show that adoption of the Yoga way of life can significantly reduce the job burnout of managers. The Yoga way of life is an integrated approach to the changing physical, mental, vital and emotional personality of an individual. It is aimed at making managers more evolved individuals with better understanding of their job situation in the overall context of life. Through a rigorous literature review and understanding of the science of Yoga as given in our scriptures, the paper also provides an explanation of the mechanism of how this happens. Among many suggested coping skills for stress, yoga happens to be fitting in the best, mainly because of its ability to change positively the individual responses to stress stimuli. However, in order to get benefit of Yoga in its entirety, one has to adopt Yoga as a technique of life management. The authors motivate the HR managers in organizations to explore ways of implementing the Yoga way of life as it promises to address the issue of stress at a fundamental level.