Sex role stress and job burnout among family practice physicians

Abstract Relationships among sex role stress, gender, and job burnout were explored for 67 family practice physicians in four residency programs. Sex role stress was inferred from physicians' self-descriptions, descriptions of their ideal physician, and discrepancies between real and ideal on the three dimensions of the Personal Attributes Questionnaire. Job burnout was assessed with the emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of accomplishment subscales of the Maslach Burnout Inventory. No gender differences were found on the MBI. On the PAQ, the women viewed themselves as more expressive and sensitive to experiencing hurt feelings than did the men, who saw themselves as more instrumental than did the women. The sexes agreed in describing their ideal physician as more instrumental and expressive than they saw themselves to be. Men fell short of their ideal on expressiveness to a greater degree than did women, whereas women fell short of their ideal on instrumentality and sensitivity to hurt feelings to a greater degree than did men. For both sexes, sex role measures were most strongly related to the accomplishment subscales of MBI.