Mensen met een roeping: een zegen of een zorg in de hulpverlening?

Workers with a calling: Blessed or in need in our care system? Workers with a calling: Blessed or in need in our care system? People who feel they have a calling find their work meaningful. A calling leads to a heightened motivation for work and could therefore be related to less emotional exhaustion. The related concept of spirituality might also have an inverse relation with exhaustion. Calling might also moderate the relation between emotional demands and exhaustion.We investigated these relationships in 235 employees working in a mental health institution. Spirituality overlapped only marginally with calling. There was a positive relationship between emotional demands and emotional exhaustion, and a negative relationship between calling and emotional exhaustion. Calling explained four percent of the variance in emotional exhaustion, but did not moderate the relation between emotional demands and emotional exhaustion. One aspect of spirituality, connectedness with the self, was also negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Persons with a calling are not protected in any special way from emotional demands, but suffer less from emotional exhaustion.