Burnout, Organizational Justice and Intentions to leave in Mexican Non-Profit-Organizations (NPO)

Introduction
NPO in Mexico represent more and more paid working-places especially for educative and health professionals (Girardo, 2010). This kind of occupations entails the “endemic” risk of burnout because of their relational character (Gil-Monte, 2005; Converso & Falcetta, 2007; Arias & Juárez, 2011). Additionally, in former qualitative studies we met discontent of Mexican NPO-employees in regard to the justice of their contractual treatment, and considering turnover (Girardo, 2010; Hindrichs, Converso & Girardo, 2010; Hindrichs, Girardo & Converso, 2011). Our hypothesis is that perception of less organizational justice increases burnout-risk and reinforces the worker’s intentions to leave (Littlewood, 2007).

Methods
We applied a self-report questionnaire to 150 employees of three Mexican NPO working in the educational and community sector. The questionnaire includes the 20 items of Gil-Monte’s CESQT to evaluate burnout (Gil-Monte, 2005) validated for Mexican population (Gil-Monte, Unda & Sandoval, 2008; Gil-Monte & Zúñiga-Caballero, 2010), the 8 items of Simon’s and Roberson’s (2003) scale of procedural and interactional organizational justice validated for Mexican population (Littlewood, 2007), and 4 items investigating the employee’s intentions to leave (Converso, Gattino, Loera, Viotti & Hindrichs, 2009).

Results
First data analysis confirms that perception of organizational justice is correlated with the for sub-scales of CESQT (Enthusiasm toward the job, Psychological Exhaustion, Indolence, Guilt) and the intention to leave the organization (meanwhile the intention to leave the profession is positively correlated only to burnout-sub-scales), and suggests that perception of procedural and interactional organizational justice acts as moderator between burnout and intentions to leave. Further, in the organizations with equal working contracts, perception of lacking organizational justice and burnout-symptoms are significantly lower than in organizations with different forms of contracts.

Discussion
Further research with bigger samples is needed. However, results suggest the need to invest in a fairer treatment of NPO-employees to guarantee their wellbeing and to avoid exceeded turnover.