ANALYSIS OF BURNOUT LEVEL OF POLICE OFFICERS : EVIDENCE FROM MALATYA , TURKEY

Burnout, a relatively new concept, is defined as feeling cold and distant about one’s job or profession due to extreme stress or low level of job satisfaction. Police profession is considered to be one of the most likely places to observe burnout for obvious reasons. There are numerous empirical studies conducted in highly stressful or dangerous professions. They find that burnout level increases with age, lower level of job satisfaction and length of service. This study investigates the current situation burnout among Turkish police officers using a sample surveyed in the province of Malatya. The study compares the stress and burnout levels of police employees with respect to their gender, position and length of service; and finds that burnout level is higher among ordinary police officers, male police employees and more experienced police employees.


Introduction
Researchers in the fields of psychology and sociology have been investigating the burnout syndrome through experimental research for over 30 years.Theoretical structure of burnout syndrome has been presented in the literature in last 25 years.Initially perceived as a source of stress, it has been analyzed and investigated through organizational structure and human resources perspective later (Pearlman and Hartman, 1982).For example, Freudenberger initially believed that the burnout was the result of problems in organizational structure on workers but following his studies and experiments he concluded that burnout was more closely characterized with depression, unhappiness and boredom of workers (Freudenberger, 1974).
There are various definitions for burnout syndrome in the literature.Pines and Aranson (1981) define it as the situation of forcing the limits of workers physically, mentally and spiritually due excessive emotional demand in the work environment.However, the most common and widely accepted definition of burnout is done by Maslach.She defines the burnout as the situation of emotional breakdown of the workers with the feeling of lack of self esteem and self confidence as a result of intense interaction with other workers in the work place (Maslach and Zimbardo, 1982).The opposite of this situation, hence the situation of worker being happy with the interaction of other workers and his work outcome is called job satisfaction.
Despite increasing use of technology, machines and robots in the work place, it is widely accepted fact that human involvement is still the most important factor of production in most industries.Considering the ongoing shift around the globe from manufacturing to service industries, this fact becomes even more significant.Today, most economic theories include human capital as one of the key elements of production function along with technology and physical capital.Human capital simply overtook or replaced the quantity of labor in the function, hence implying that the quality of the labor is even more important than its quantity.This example highlights the importance of the quality of human resources of companies in order to achieve and ensure high productivity and efficiency.
Productivity of workers is determined by the availability of physical capital to workers, their education and skill levels and also their motivation.The latter one is very much associated with the mental and emotional state of the worker.In certain professions, high level of expectations from the worker along with the pressure from the peers and demanding work conditions may bring the workers to the point of collapse.This is especially true in professions which require being very accurate and very careful in making decisions as well as in exercising those decisions such as health workers, pilots, military professionals in close combat situations, firefighters on duty and police officers in highly hostile environments.Therefore, it is not surprising that initial studies on burnout syndrome were done on these professions.However in later years, studies on the issue were extended to other professions which require dealing with people, patience and sacrifice such as teachers, librarians, prison guards and managers (Azizoğlu, 2010).
Capitalism and resulting industrial conditions create a continuous pressure on firms to cut costs and increase profits.Firms are expected to grow forever as keeping the market share or profit levels as it was before is considered as a failure.Thus, firms set ambitious targets in each period to surpass their earlier achievements.Most of the time, this could mainly be achieved by increasing per capita output without a parallel increase in the wages.In most industries where the natural work conditions are not the source of stress, this managerial pressure is the source of burnout.
Various factors may contribute burnout state.They can be grouped as personal characteristics, social factors and organizational factors.Individual characteristics which may contribute burnout are given and they are not easy for a worker to change them in the short or medium run.Mainly these characteristics are age, gender, education level, marital status, number of kids, personal expectations, family support or lack of it.People who work in the same job with similar work conditions may show different response to stressors.For instance, studies find that young employees show higher level of burnout due to their ambitions when they are exposed to high stress conditions compared to older and more experienced workers.Similarly, females are found to be more prone to burnout compared to their male counterparts.Also, while many would expect that higher level of education would help to deal with burnout, studies find higher incidence of burnout as education level increases among workers.In addition to individual characteristics, social factors also play an important role in burnout syndrome.The most significant of these factors is the family structure of the individual.Workers with peaceful family life are less likely to be effected from burnout (Kaçmaz, 2005).
Organizational or work related factors causing burnout can be listed as working hours and its length, work load, rewards, fairness, values and feeling to be part of the organization.When workers feel that there is a lack of fairness in the organization in terms of work load, rewarding or recognition of contribution, they gradually begin to feel detached.If this situation continues in the long term as an organizational policy with no hope of real change in the horizon, workers begin to feel alienated (Arı and Bal, 2008).
It is well established in the literature that unbearable and hostile work conditions are likely to result in burnout of workers and hence reduce their job satisfaction significantly.This can happen due to direct negative result of burnout on worker's motivation as well as the indirect effect of burnout on the mental and emotional situation of the worker since these type of workers are more likely to be associated with high level of stress, mental health problems, family issues, drug addiction and possible loss of employment (Kaçmaz, 2005).The most common symptoms of burnout syndrome are reported to be being late at work, attendance issues or absenteeism, decrease in productivity, frequent errors at work, clash with the authorities and failure to obey orders (Tözün et al., 2008).Burnout syndrome can be grouped into four stages: Enthusiasm, Stagnation, Frustration and Apathy.In the enthusiasm stage, the worker is yet fresh and new to the job.He or she has great desire to work and high hopes for the future.The worker is idealistic and tries to fit in and contribute with great energy.In the presence of high stress, inadequate rewarding mechanism and lack of recognition of contribution, the worker slowly loses his enthusiasm and begins to question his or her skills.There is a significant decrease in the desire of the worker.In the third stage, the worker gets frustrated with work conditions, peers and managers.He begins to withdraw himself from work since he feels excluded.In the last stage, the worker is hopeless and tired of job.He works only because he feels obligated (Balcıoğlu et al, 2008).
Security forces face with burnout syndrome more frequently compared to other professions due to nature and risk structure of the work.However, the burnout experienced by military personnel versus police officers is also substantially different due to differences in people that they deal with.This study focuses on burnout syndrome in police officers and police chiefs.While military personnel are prepared to deal with armed groups and soldiers mostly in combat environment, police officers deal with any type of offender from domestic violence to bank robbery, from rape to homicide in civilian life environment.In other words, they deal with criminals in any location at any given time so their daily life is a combat zone while for military personnel the combat zone is more limited and obvious.
This study intends to analyze the level of burnout and resulting job satisfaction level and the relationship between them using a sample from Malatya province of Turkey.This study extends an earlier study which was done with a relatively small sample size of only 89 officers from the city center of Malatya province by surveying 214 police officers from the center and towns of Malatya this time.The small sample size makes it rather difficult to reach reliable and significant result in many hypotheses tested.
Malatya is located in the eastern part of Turkey and it is quite close to the area where long time clash between terrorist organization, PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) and Turkish Security Forces though it is not considered as a center of terrorist activity of PKK.Therefore, the alert level in the area can be considered as medium.An earlier but not yet published study by the authors surveyed 89 police officers in the center of Malatya.However, this paper improves this study by increasing the sample size almost three times by including the police officers working in other town centers of Malaty a province in the sample who were not part of the study in the first stage of the research.

Literature Review on Burnout Syndrome
There is an extensive research about burnout syndrome in the psychology and business literature.Burnout syndrome was first introduced by Freudenberger in order to explain the notion of fatigue, exhaustion, disappointment and loss of desire to work observed among Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences workers (Kaçmaz, 2005).Later, Maslach and Jackson helped develop the theoretical model of burnout syndrome.Freudenberger initiated his work on the issue in 1974 because of his observations of fatigue and despair among nurses and doctors in medical facilities.Freudenberger associated these symptoms with the excessive demand of employers from the workers and resulting feeling of being tired and despair (Süloğlu, 2009).
However, the term of "burnout" first appeared in a novel entitled "A Burn-Out Case" by Graham Greene in 1961 in which the story of an architect who was exhausted and had quit his job and moved to African jungle was told.This book analyzed the concept of burnout in great detail and defined the concept as "losing someone his sense of loyalty and compassion to his profession."This clearly indicates that the concept was well known and defined by sociologists as an important social issue (Maslach et al., 2001).
Burnout is a psychological syndrome that results from a continuous exposure to chronic interpersonal stress sources on the workplace.The main dimensions of this exposure are an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion, feeling detached from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment at work (Maslach 1993).Burnout is the polar case of job satisfaction where people experience energy, involvement with their work, and feelings of effectiveness (Maslach & Leiter 1997).Maslach believes that burnout syndrome does not occur suddenly.It is result of an accumulation of mental and physical stress in occupations which require highly complicated and stressful work conditions as well as in occupations that require more intense human interaction like certain service sectors such as teaching and policing (Erol et al., 2007).
Much of the research on burnout has focused on determining what causes it and who is at higher risk of experiencing it.Mainly, six key areas of work life are identified as predictors of burnout.These are level of workload, control mechanism, community involvement, company values, rewarding scheme for workers, and fairness of managers (Maslach & Leiter 1997, Leiter & Maslach 2004).Research on these six areas suggests that there is a consistent correlation among them and a careful analyze of these predictors help to determine the likelihood and the level of burnout experienced by workers.
Business studies in burnout research have focused on the relationship between burnout level and important work outcomes.For example, some studies have found a significant negative relationship between level of nurse burnout and the quality of patient care (Leiter et al. 1998, Laschinger & Leiter 2006).In general, burnout has been found to be correlated with various forms of negative attitudes towards job such as job dissatisfaction, low organizational commitment, absenteeism, intention to leave the job, and high turnover (Schaufeli & Enzmann 1998).
On the other hand, it should be noted that research on the polar case, job satisfaction, began much earlier, in 1920s.Initially the research focused on understanding what makes workers happier and more productive and how to increase this happiness and productivity over the time (Tözün et al., 2008).Then, researchers witnessed several cases specifically in nursing and teaching where firms faced with increasing number of workers who felt exhausted, detached and failed in their jobs despite all their efforts to boost employee morale and productivity.Only then, the term of burnout syndrome was introduced to the literature.But, today many researcher accept that burnout is not only limited to certain professions with high level of stress.It is widely observed phenomenon in many areas of industrial production as well as service industries.It becomes more and more important issue with the increasing level of income and wealth in developed and developing countries.As expected, there are many studies done in analyzing burnout level of police officers as police officers are prone to high level of stress.Burke (1993) surveyed 828 police officers in order to investigate the impact of their job satisfaction level on their mental and physical health.He found a high level of burnout among police officers and that was negatively affecting their mental and physical health.Golembiewski et al. (1992) surveyed 213 police officers in order to find out the impact of burnout of police officers on their mental health and found higher incidence of mental problems in the officers with higher level of burnout experienced.Şanlı (2006) conducted a study on police officers in order to determine the effect of demographic characteristics on job satisfaction and burnout level.He found that both job satisfaction and burnout level differed with respect to workplace, work system, and economic conditions.Martinussen et al. (2007) examine the relationship between job demands, job resources, and burnout in police officers.They also check if burnout could predict both work and health-related outcomes among police officers by applying a questionnaire on 223 Norwegian police officers.They found that the overall level of burnout was low among police officers compared to other occupational groups tested in Norway.Both job demands and job resources were related to burnout as expected and especially work-family pressure was an important predictor for all of the three burnout dimensions.Burnout was helpful to predict individual outcomes, such as psychosomatic complaints and satisfaction with life, as well as work outcomes like job satisfaction, loyalty and intention to quit.Gershon et al. (2002) studied work stress and resulting burnout in aging police officers using a sample of 1106 police officers (of which 105 was over 50 and were selected for this study) from a large urban area police department in the United States and found the higher incidence of stress-related health issues as well as heavy drinking and gambling problems compared to younger police officers who were not exposed to work related stress since they were working under less stressful conditions.McCarty et al. (2007) investigate if male and female police officers report different levels of occupational stress and burnout using a sample of police officers working in a large city in the Northeast of the United States.They also examine whether various factors that are believed to influence occupational stress and burnout have different level of impact on male and female officers.They find that male and female officers are not exposed to significantly different levels of occupational stress and burnout.According to the results of separate multivariate analyses, they suspect that male and female officers may be prune to the same set of stressors in the police organization.Also, multivariate results indicate that African-American female officers report significantly higher levels of burnout than other officers.Yang and Wang (2008) investigate the causes of police burnout in Chinese police forces.They list long-term occupational danger, heavy public and peer pressure, high strength and hyperirritability are likely reasons to cause professional burnout.They conclude that understanding the causes and countermeasures of professional burnout is of great realistic significance for enhancing the efficiency of police actions.Police professional burnout can be eliminated through optimizing social environment, improving management structure of police agencies, strengthening legal rights of the police officers and increasing the quality of police cadets.Hall et al. (2010) propose and test a comprehensive theory designed to explain seemingly contradictory relations between job demands, emotional exhaustion, and work-family conflict reported in the literature.Using various theories of burnout they Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, ( 2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences hypothesized that job demands would spillover to emotional exhaustion, and alternatively that job demands would also spillover to work-family conflict.They also hypothesized that a new and more complex model representing reciprocal and cross-linked effects could explain the existing data better.They tested their hypotheses using a longitudinal data of 257 Australian police officers in two different periods with, at least with a year distance.Using structural equation modeling, they found that the more complex model fitted the data better than other models.They conclude that interventions to reduce work demands arising from work pressure and emotional demands are indicated to prevent conflict at home and burnout in police officers.
There is a consensus in the literature and among scholars that burnout is a negative phenomenon.However, interestingly one study actually claims a potential positive side of burnout.Euwema et al. (2004) analyzes the behavior of police officers in conflict situations and investigates how burnout and resulting reduced dominance may affect policing outcomes.They claim that burnout reduces the dominance which plays an importance role in police-civilian interactions, and paradoxically this may lead to more effective outcomes in conflict situations.The study aims to understand the effect of burnout in policing practice by analyzing the relationship among demands, rewards, occupational burnout and police officers' behavior in conflict situations using a questionnaire among 358 Dutch police officers.In addition, they observed the interaction between these police officers and civilians for over 122 days.They find that the imbalance between job demands and rewards was a good predictor of burnout.They also find that burnout predicted a decrease in dominant behavior, as expected, in conflict situations and then this leads to more effective outcomes in conflict situations.But this conclusion seems a big leap of faith as one might interpret that reduced dominance, whether it is a result of burnout or something else might be a positive factor in dealing with conflict situations.The authors conclude that benefits of reduced dominance in these situations should be taken into account in the training of professionals.However, the positive link between burnout and better results in conflict situations does not seem convincing.

Data and Methodology
This study uses primary data collected from a sample of police officers and police chiefs randomly selected from the police force of Malatya province.The population of this study is the whole Turkish Police Organization and it would be ideal to use stratified sample for the purpose of the study.However, this requires a special permission from the general directorate of Turkish police and generally it is a lengthy and uncertain process.Therefore, instead authors opted to limit the scope of the study into single province, Malatya, where one of the authors was officially employed in the police forces in the province; hence it was possible to obtain necessary permission from the chief of police for the province.
This study applied a survey that consisted of forty three questions in four sub sections; profile, emotional exhaustion, individual accomplishment and feeling of detachment.In the first section, three personal profile questions; gender, position and length of service are asked.Age initially was part of the questionnaire but later it was excluded as age and length of service are almost perfectly correlated with each other in the Turkish Police Organization due to narrow hiring age window.The rest of the questions ask the opinion of participants about various aspects of their job satisfaction and related issues.Majority of the questions were adopted from Operational and Organizational Police Stress Questionnaires developed by McCreary and Thompson (2006) and modified for this study.However, this study uses 5 level Likert scale instead of 7 level used by the developers (where 1 indicates "strongly disagree" and 5 indicates "strongly agree").
This study compares the mean responses of survey participants for each question and determine if there is a significant difference among the participants with respect to their gender, position and length of service.This study also developed a score system to measure the stress level of each participant by assigning a unit value for the response of each question, for any given participant.As there are forty of 5 level Likert questions, any participant is expected to collect a total points of 40 (minimum possible score) to 200 (maximum possible score).Then, the average stress score will be calculated for each sub group, by simply calculating the mean of the stress scores for each participant in that group.However, it should be noted that, in such a design, more statistical analysis and more complex methodoly would be needed in order to correctly decide about the boundaries of high stress versus medium level stress or low stress.But this is beyond the scope of this paper.Therefore, this study uses mean stress scores only to make comparisons among police officers with respect to their gender, position and length of service.
In addition, this study employed factor analysis in order to determine if grouping the questions would produce meaningful results.Factor analysis results indicated that the most efficient number of factors was five.However, after careful analysis of the groupings, it was decided to use four grouping.In this stage, authors decided to combine the results of factor analysis with the intuition and constructed groupings which only partially supported by the results of the statistical analysis.Therefore, the factor analysis results are not provided in the paper as they are not fully employed but rather are the main basis for the question selection.In doing so, the study aimed to come up with meaningful groupings of the questions.According to this methodology, following groups and resulting scores are calculated: • Job Satisfaction Score (Questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 20) • Personal Exhaustion Score (Questions 16,17,32,34,36,37,39 and 40) • Detachment Score (Questions 19,21,22,23,24 and 35) • Lack of Accomplishment Score (Questions 26,27,28,29,33 and 38) As a result of varying number of questions selected for each classification, boundaries for each participant's relevant score also vary (For instance it will be between 14 and 70 for job satisfaction score while it will be between 8 and 40 for personal exhaustion score for each participant).It should be noted that these grouping logic essentially follows Maslach (1993)'s three dimensional approach to burnout.Sum of the personal exhaustion score, detachment score and lack of accomplishment score can be defined as "burnout score".This study also measures burnout score and check for the differences of mean values of those scores with respect to gender, position and length of service.
As explained above, initially the survey was conducted only in the province center of Malatya with 89 police officers and police administrators.However, the sample size was not large enough to have reliable results and therefore in the second stage the study was extended to the police forces working in other cities and towns of Malatya province in order to increase the sample size.With this extension, the total sample size reached to 214.Data were analyzed using SPSS 19.0 statistical package.Descriptive statistics of the sample is provided in Table 1.As it can be seen from the table, majority of the survey participants are male and this is not surprising since the Turkish Police Force is heavily male oriented as it is the case in most countries.Similarly, majority of the respondents are regular police officer without a rank.Ranking officers in the survey consists of lower level police administrators such as deputy commissairs, commissairs and police superintendents.Finally, large percentage of respondents is officers with less than 10 years experience.
It should be noted in Turkish Police Force appointments are done through central placement system and officers are subjected to rotation in different parts of the country frequently, including a mandatory service requirement in the eastern part of the country where terrorist activities of PKK exist and also the area is less developed, hence less desired by many officers to locate and work.Therefore, decreasing number of officers in the province can also be explained with the fact that most police officers choose to serve in the western provinces of Turkey once they complete their mandatory service in the Eastern Turkey.However, as explained in the introduction, Malatya province is considered to be relatively safe and peaceful as well as desirable.Therefore, the percentage of officers with more than 10 years of experience can still be considered as high, especially after taking natural decrease in the number of experienced officers due to deaths and resignations into consideration.

Empirical Results
As explained above, survey questions were prepared using Operational and Organizational Police Stress Questionnaries developed by McCreary and Thompson (2006) and these surveys have already been tested and were found to be reliable.Further test of modified questionnaire of this study using Cronbach's Alpha was conducted and the reliability of 40 survey questions was checked.According to this particular reliablity test: if α < 0.5, the test is not reliable at all, if 0.5 ≤ α < 0.6, the reliability of the test is poor, if 0.6 ≤ α < 0.7, the reliability of the test is at questionable level, if 0.7 ≤ α < 0.8, the reliability of the test is at acceptable level, if 0.8 ≤ α < 0.9, the reliability of the test is good; and if α ≥ 0.9, the reliability of the test is excellent (George and Mallery, 2003).The Cronbach's Alpha test result, α, for the survey is found as 0.911 and therefore it is safe to claim that the survey questions are consistent and highly reliable.Existing literature on the topic finds a positive correlation between length of service and burnout in highle stressed prone professions like policing.Therefore, this study tests this finding to find out if it is also the case with the Turkish Police Force in Malatya province.In addition, this study also tests if there is a difference in terms of burnout or personal exhaustion between male and female officers as well as between regular police officers and ranking officers.
Table 2 presents the summary of mean responses to survey questions along with their standard deviation.The average value of mean responses is equal to 3.26 and the standard deviation of mean responses is equal to 0.58.According to Table 2, four of the responses have a mean value over 4.0 and ten of them have a mean value over 3.50.Considering mean responses higher than 3.50 as an indication of heavily agreeing with the statement and indicating a possibly important issue, it can be concluded that police employees in the sample, ignoring their gender, position and length of service for the sake of the discussion, are not pleased at all with the level of bureaucracy and red taping in the organization, working hours and shift work, financial compensation and with internal investigation procedures.In addition, they also are somewhat displeased with frequent changes in policies, promotion system and promotion opportunies, and unfair distribution of responsibilities.They complain about lack of time for their families and friends due to their job obligations.They feel not appreciated by their supervisers and also many of them feel trapped in this line of work, which can be explained with the fact that ranking officers are obligated to pay a hefty sum in case they want to quit before they complete their mandatory service time which is the result of their education cost fully paid by the government and can be as high as 16 years for some officers.about working hours, financial compensation, promotion procedures, fear of internal investigations and favoritism in the organization; male employees perceive a significantly higher level of negative impacts of above-mentioned factors.Male employees also seem to report experiencing higher levels of negative personal feelings about themselves and their surrounding.However, this is not surprising given the structure and working conditions of Turkish Police Organization, where relatively low percentage of female officers are hired and they are generally employed at desk jobs in order to reduce their exposure to physical danger.
In general, results indicate that all poice employees regardless of their rank complain about too much bureaucracy and red taping, favoritism, working hours and conditions, promotion system, lack of time for family and friends, frequent changes in regulations and worrying for internal investigations.However, ordinary police officers' responses indicate that they perceive a higher level of unfairness in promotions as well as distribution of work responsibilities.They also believe that promotion opportunities are more limited for themselves compared to ranking officers.This can be explained with the fact that only a small percentage of police officer can actually promote to ranking officer position each year since the majority of ranking officers in Turkish Police was recruited from the graduates of Police Academy in the past.
In addition, there were numerous complaints and reports about the unfaireness of the selection process.They also indicate that they have lower level of confidence in their superiors when it comes to their support during internal investigations.Ordinary police officers complain more about lack of time for their families.Ranking officers report generally lower level of responses compared to ordinary police officers, indicating lower level of dissatisfaction.However, interestingly, ranking officers' responses indicate significantly higher issues about their career choice and feeling trapped in the police organization.This is not surprising finding considering that most of the ranking officers are the graduates of Turkish Police Academy and they are selected through an aptitude test from very successful middle school and high school students when they are very young.Majority of them choose the career because of the allure of the uniform, guidance from their families and the impact of TV series and movies without really grasping what the choice requires from them.In other words, their choice may not be exactly rational and well informed choice as they are not fully aware of alternatives and opportunity cost of their choice.Therefore, overtime it is normal to see that some of them are disappointed as they face the difficulties of the job, lack of proper rewarding and their classmates from secondary and high school in other profession with more attractive conditions.
Experience also has a large impact on burnout incidence and level of job satisfaction.Employees with more experience seem to complain significantly more about frequent changes in regulations and legislation, lack of support from their superiors when they face with a problem at work, lack of appropriate financial compensation for their efforts and occupational health problems.They also report significantly higher level of dissatisfaction when it comes to job related stressors.These results are even more obvious when police employees with 15 year or more experience are compared to police officers with 5 or less years of experience.Experienced police employees indicate that they are not happy with their career choice; they have low expectations for the future and they would not recommend their profession to others.On the other hand, police employees with less experience seem to complain more about the fairness in the distribution of work responsibilities among the employees.
Table 4 presents the results of comparisons of stress score, job satisfaction score, personal exhaustion score, detachment score, lack of accomplishment score and overall burnout score.It should be noted that, because of negative nature of questions statements, job satisfaction score was calculated by using the inverse valuation of responses (in other words, a "strongly disagree" response by a participant was valued as 5 instead of 1).The results indicate a significant difference only between relatively new recruits and experienced police employees in terms of overall stress score.When the groups are compared in terms of job satisfaction level, the only significant difference appear between male and female police employees.In terms of personal exhaustion score, significant difference is found between male and female employees as well as between less experienced and more experienced employees.As it is in line with stress score, male employees have a higher level of stress, though it is not significant, and also they experience a higher level of exhaustion due to harsher work conditions.Similarly, both in stress scores and personal exhaustion scores experienced workers exhibit significantly higher levels compared to their less experienced counterparts.Police officers experience a significantly higher level of detachment from job compared to police chiefs.Similarly experienced employees face with higher level of detachment compared to less experienced employees.Interestingly, however, when the comparison is made in terms of mean burnout score, significant difference in mean score values is observed across all sub groups.According to these results, it is possible to conclude that male employees, ordinary police officers and more experienced employees experience a higher level of burnout compared to female employees, police chiefs and less experienced employees, respectively.

Conclusion
Burnout is an important phenomenon in labor and labor relations literature as it effects labor moral hence labor productivity in the firms and institutions.Numerous studies has aimed to understand the reasons for burnout and to find out ways to reduce the level of it.Burnout is more common in ceratin professions which require intensive dealing with people or professions which are dangerous and highly stress ful by the nature of the job This study finds that there are signs of burnout in Turkish Police Organization based on the results of a sample selected from the police employees in Malatya province of Turkey.The results indicate that police employees complain about the level of bureaucracy and red taping in the organization, working hours and shift work, financial compensation and internal investigation procedures.In addition, they are not pleased with frequent changes in regulations and legislations, promotion system and promotion opportunies, and unfair distribution of responsibilities.They also complain about lack of time for their families and friends due to their job obligations.They indicate lack of appreciation by their supervisers and they feel trapped in their current job.
The results of the study indicate low lovel of job satisfaction and hence signals of burnout in police employees.Male employees face with a significantly higher level of negative impacts of irregular working hours, high level of bureaucracy, limited promotion opportunities and unfair promotion practices.They also report experiencing higher levels of negative personal feelings about themselves and their surrounding.Ordinary police officers report that they experience a higher level of unfairness in promotions as well as distribution of work responsibilities.They claim that promotion opportunities are more limited for themselves compared to ranking officers.They feel that they cannot trust their superiors when it comes to their support in case they are in trouble because of something they did during performing their work.Ordinary police officers complain more about lack of time for their families while ranking officers regret for their career choice and feel trapped in the police organization.On the other hand, police employees with more experience complain significantly more about frequent changes in regulations and legislation, lack of support from their superiors when they face with a problem at work, lack of appropriate financial compensation for their efforts and occupational health problems compared to police employees with less experience.
Finally, this study finds that there is a significant difference between relatively new recruits and experienced police employees in terms of overall stress level.Using the score system developed by this study, it is found that male employees, ordinary police officers and more experienced employees experience a higher level of burnout compared to female employees, police chiefs and less experienced employees, respectively.

Epiphany:
Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences such as teaching, medical services, fire fighting and policing.

Table 1 :
Descriptive Statistics of the Sample Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Table 2 :
Summary of Responses to Survey Questions

Table 3 :
Comparison of Results with respect to Gender, Rank and Experience Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Table 3
presents the results for the mean comparison of each question with respect to gender, rank and length of service at 5 percent significance level.Survey results, in general, are in line with the expectations and earlier findings in the literature.It is possible to see from the results the indications of low lovel of job satisfaction and hence signals of burnout in police employees.Though majority of the police employees complain Epiphany: Journal of Transdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, (2016) © Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Table 4 :
Score Comparisons with respect to Gender, Rank and Experience