Introduction

Globalization has made companies have to adapt to consumer technologies and requirements, so they need to constantly reinvent themselves and capitalize and maintain their customers. The progress of technology has been making work more complex and requiring people with greater skills, the opposite of what occurred in the Taylorist-Fordist (Limongi-França, 2004). And external market changes have internally affected organizations, and such factors have contributed to the requirements increasing, as workers now need to have specific skills to overcome the challenges faced in a competitive environment. However, such conditions can directly impact the development, performance, and health of professionals.

The world of work has evolved in several aspects, previously companies were concerned with meeting goals regardless of the risks to the physical and mental health of those involved in the process. Currently, we see that the work and challenges faced in professional activities can be closely linked to diseases and the detriment of the health of employees. In this sense, the study of the correlation between burnout syndrome (occupational disease tied to work) com labor pressure emerges as an alternative for the adaptation of companies to market changes and in the maintenance of the health of their employees.

Verifying the impacts of market pressure on the internal environment of organizations and especially on the health of professionals can collaborate in the demonstration of alternatives so that these factors do not negatively harm the health of their employees. Limongi-França (2004) points out that the challenge is to reorganize the competitive environment in a harmonious way for health.

Thus, the theme aims to investigate how to preserve physical and mental health in a competitive environment and verify how to market pressure has contributed to the emergence of burnout syndrome, since no previous studies on this topic were found. This study also provides support for managers who seek solutions in this context, that is, in suggestions of activities that help in the conservation of the physical and mental health of their managers.

In a globalized world, where competitiveness inevitably arises among organizations, because each one wants to offer the best and be a reference to their customers, after all, companies want to get ahead of their competitors through competitive advantage over their products or services. Because of this, increased business pressure on innovation and results comes at the same level, leaders are focused on achieving goals, and many employees can't handle this charge and are productive. In other words, competition has made organizations worry about efficiency, but it is necessary to look at human capital and your health. According to the National Association of Occupational Medicine (ANAMT, 2018), 30% of Brazilians suffer from burnout syndrome, recognized on January 1, 2022, as an occupational disease by the World Health Organization, related to professional exhaustion. Thus, the theme aims to manifest the correlation of market competitiveness with burnout syndrome and how organizations and their leaders can preserve the physical and mental health of their employees in this scenario.

Theoretical framework

Globalization, competitiveness, and human capital

Globalization has enabled people and businesses to connect through technologies and information. Such internationalization has increased access to consumers for products and services by a different possibility of companies and they buy from those who satisfy the best. In other words, the competitiveness engine refers to the aspects in which an enterprise must show good performance to distinguish itself and retain itself in the market (Roman et al., 2012). After all, in a market with frequent changes, companies will only be able to remain competitive if they have adaptability (Bethlen, 2004).

Companies have sought to get ahead of their competitors by delivering the best to their customers. According to Limongi-França (2004), many techniques, for example just in time, would have arisen precisely to expand competitiveness through productivity accompanied by quality. And all of this depends on the delivery of employees in business activities. Competitive advantage comes through alliances, technology, knowledge, and innovation, among others, but mainly competitiveness depends on something paramount, human capital (Drucker, 1997).

The human capital factor has extreme relevance in this process because it is the people responsible for the activities that will determine the result. After all, as Roman et al. (2012, p. 34) quote it, “the objectives of an organization will be successfully achieved if they are focused on policies of valorization of human capital, through training, social integration of individuals and motivation”. Employees must be prepared to face competitive and enthusiastic changes in the performance of their work.

Burnout syndrome and employee health

Burnout syndrome is capable of being a chronic reaction that follows the work situation through interpersonal stressors since the company and its environment can be agents of a cause of suffering and exhaustion of employees. In this sense, burnout is integrated with three characteristics, which are emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal achievement at work (Maslach; Jackson, 1981).

Burnout syndrome or professional exhaustion is already characterized as a working disorder by Law n. 3048/99, social security. This exhaustion is attributed to the lack of energy and enthusiasm, by the feeling of loss of resources due to the feeling of disappointment and tension of the professionals. The employee becomes unhappy and evaluated negatively because he/she does not feel able to perform his activities (Moreno et al., 2010).

Such insecurity produces symptoms such as anxiety, frustration, fear, tiredness, headache, insomnia, stress, discouragement etc. However, these factors are related to the quality of life in the workplace, where the development of activities occurs (Limongi-França, 2004). The professional must adapt to the place and meet the needs of the company in which he operates, but the corporation itself should also favor this process (Moreno et al., 2010).

Strong and excessive work pressure can overcome high levels of occupational stress, providing negative effects on organizational productivity and the mental and physical health of professionals (Bakker; Demerouti, 2017). The company must see its employees beyond their skills. Companies cannot exclusively have the best resources and be competitive but create strategies to align goals with their professionals so that they favor their physical and mental health and not the other way around.

Leadership and its leaders

Through globalization in recent decades, team leadership has become one of the biggest challenges for companies, as the way a manager deals with his team members directly impacts the results that his leaders will bring to the corporation. According to Hersey and Blanchard (1986, p. 85) “organizations that win have a basic attribute that stifles them from those that do not work: dynamic and efficient leadership”, that is, leading people and leading the team to expected results is more than charging, is to lead by example, with care and respect, awakening the best of each, since there are different competencies and will not be creating a toxic environment, with excess collections and/or moral harassment that a company will achieve its goals. The challenge is to create a competitive environment with well-being, considering all its aspects, organizational, social, biological, and psychological (Limongi-França, 2004).

In addition, a company that has leaders who think only of the brute, without worrying about the people involved in the productive processes, is outdated, and can cause problems related to the quality of life and mental health, even causing the emergence of work sickness and burnout syndrome. After all, the emphatic work rate and the intensification of what is required of the professional in performing their tasks may be correlated with the progressive increase in occupational diseases (Silva, 2013). According to Moreno et al. (2010), burnout syndrome negatively impacts the employee, the client, and the company, so it is necessary to develop strategies for coping to alleviate the problems existing in the workplace and cause a better state of life.

The coronavirus pandemic proved that sudden changes in work routine and seclusion can be very negative for productivity, as Limongi-France (2004, p. 45) quotes. The virtualization of jobs in Brazil and the redevelopment of teams to the home office, without a previously developed culture created for this style of work, demonstrated that Brazilian leaders, for example, were unprepared to act in this new model, creating demotivated and stressed teams due to the problematic scenario of the 2020 pandemic. The leader needs to have technical preparation to assume his position within a given sector but needs to know how to deal with people and lead them to results that will maintain competitiveness in the market, aiming not only the brute but as Limongi-France (2004) refers to well-being in the direction of maintaining integrity as professional, citizen and person.

Leadership Challenges in team management and organizational climate

For a company to be successful it is not enough just to have the best technology or the best product, it needs to have quality management and leadership plays a fundamental role in the human capital involved after it will be the leaders who will be a team driver throughout the conduct of a business.

According to Golleman (2014, p. 201) “directing attention where it needs to go is a basic task of leadership”, this means visualizing professionals who are unmotivated and with adversities in the realization of their activities, so the leader must act without delay for the sake of his leader when he needs his attention. At this point, we can affirm that Hersey and Blanchard (1986) and the style of situational leadership that these two authors left described makes perfect sense, in which each leader needs the support of their leader according to the level of maturity for a given task. Of course, the leader who evaluates their team looks at each one individually and manages to give due courtesy to his leaders in a strategic and personalized way, makes his team much more productive, because he will be able to get the best out of each and provide a more positive organizational climate.

According to Chiavenato (2005), the expression of organizational climate concerns the internal aspects of an organization, the psychological atmosphere, and the particularities of the company, it manages to be felt psychologically and is circumstantially linked to the motivational attributes of the organization’s internal environment, the collective perception of the company’s employees, and how people will behave each other. When the leader understands the difficulties of the individuals and the challenges of his team it is possible to plan a plan to develop them and generate motivation, this was a feeling of belonging since they are welcomed, directly influencing the organizational climate. In other words, employees will be happy to belong to the company, which decreases the rates of sick leave, for example.

Methodology

Regarding the methodology adopted, qualitative research was chosen, carried out through bibliographic research, which serves as theoretical support for the investigation of the subject, in agreement with Gil (2002, p. 44) “is developed based on material already elaborated, consisting mainly of books and scientific articles”. Thus, the research of this work sought to cover knowledge already published by other authors and now consider the pressure of the market, leadership, and human capital related to burnout syndrome.

Then the questionnaire was conducted through quantitative research cross-sectional analytics, considering the availability of individuals to be part of a sample of the population as mentioned by Marconi and Lakatos (2003, p. 162) “the sample is a conveniently selected portion of the universe (population); it is a subset of the universe” to verify whether external pressure and overcharging by leadership, driven by market competition, has contributed to the emergence of burnout syndrome in employees.

From that moment on, a pre-test (pilot) was carried out with 4 people from our university, where 26 of 30 questions remained, finalizing the validation of the questionnaire.

The Quantitative and Explanatory research phase was conducted through a Google Forms questionnaire, by the authors themselves, composed of 26 questions, divided into three blocks, with 220 respondents who participated voluntarily. This questionnaire had a very diverse population, both among students and professors of a São Paulo university, as well as professionals in the accounting area, virtual assistants, autonomists, and professionals of different areas and ages, all from the State of São Paulo, to see how the leaders act and how the profiles in functions behave and bring behavioral samples of symptoms or indications biased to the burnout syndrome, that is, any professional in any area may or may not come across burnout in their life.

The questions of the first stage were focused on filtering the respondent’s profile, age group, gender, the situation at the time (working or not), and form of work (home office or face-to-face). For those who have never worked, the questionnaire was closed, continuing for the next stage only with professionals who have already worked or are inserted in the market, to measure more specifically. Aiming at explanatory research, because as Gil (2002) declares, the central focus is to recognize the factors that determine or cooperate for the succession of phenomena. To do so, collect data from people who have already worked or currently work to collect information to understand the variables related to the topic addressed.

In the second block, it was asked more specifically about the leadership and how the respondent feels concerning the pressure of the market and the leadership on him, this block focused on understanding how the internal and external environment of the labor market impact professionals, regardless of their area of expertise.

To assess the risk at which the 204 people who have worked or worked have to have burnout syndrome, the questions of the steps test (2020) were used, which cites as a source the HDI (Lippi Human Development Institute), where was possible to classify the level of risk in which each person is. This test consists of 15 questions, presented in Table 1. Where the respondent can choose 1 of 5 options for each question according to the frequency that is identified: never (15 to 18 points), rarely (19 to 32 points), sometimes (33 points to 49 points), frequently (50 to 59 points) and all the time (60 to 75 points).

It was questioned what the respondents’ work model was: face-to-face, home-office, or external activity, intending to verify which work model has the highest risk in the development of burnout syndrome, using the scores of the questions corresponding to the test in Table 1.

The questions da Table 1 were also used to verify through binary comparison the behavioral tendency, that is, the path taken by the professional to develop burnout syndrome. Thus, we considered the two frequencies and their respective questions that scored the most in the response category of the binary comparison performed.

Subsequently, Pearson’s linear correlation was calculated to understand the relationship between external pressure and the risk of burnout, through the result of the sum of the scores of each person related to Table 1. Pearson’s linear correlation is the most appropriate statistical model to assimilate the relationship of between variables.

Results and discussions

With the application of the questionnaire, 220 responses were obtained, 68,20% of women cisgender (who identify with their gender of birth), 28,60% cisgender men, and 3,20% who identify with another gender. 55,09% from 18 to 28 years old, 23,02% from 29 to 39 years, 14,10% from 40 to 50 years, 4,50% from 51 to 59 years, and 2,30% from 60 years. With this, it is shown that most respondents are young people who have entered the world of work. Of these 220 answers, 80,50% of people work, 12,30% have worked and 7,30% have never worked, the questionnaire was closed for those who have never worked to ascertain the variables related to burnout syndrome, which is work sickness. This study is limited to the influence of external pressure on burnout, it is a cross-sectional study, and the data are obtained in a temporal period. It is also limited to the management of leadership in workers since it does not extend to the development of methodologies and approaches applied leadership to exercise.

In Table 2 below it is possible to visualize the test results, and that among 204 people, only 4 people have no sign of burnout, revealing that most are inclined to have an occupational disease.

Regarding the work model experienced by each one, we found that people who work in person have greater risks for burnout: 42,65% are at risk, 19,12% are at high risk and 14,21% are at enormous risk. One of the factors is that they are physically in the workplace and their organizational climate influence the development of their activities, another factor is direct contact with leadership and excess charges that contribute to physical and mental exhaustion.

From these numbers, a binary comparison was made to verify which test questions stand out most concerning frequencies: frequently and always, evidenced in Table 3, to understand the causes and the path taken until the professional is prone to burnout and what can affect him, the two questions that scored the most in the binary comparison in their respective frequencies were considered. Here is the interface.

Table 3 above, from the questions that obtained the highest score and highlighted the frequencies “often and always”, it was possible to perceive that there is a relationship in the behavioral tendency. The first situation is discouragement and energy being exhausted and the person already has negative thoughts about his employment. Then, the person begins to feel uncomfortable with the pressure suffered to achieve professional success, whether this internal pressure in the work environment by the leadership in search of positive results for the organization, or the external labor market (competitiveness). Thus, the person ends up being affected by the external environment, starting to feel without time and energy to plan things as he would like, being taken more and more by demotivation and apathy, going down the physical and emotional energy for tasks that were previously simple and even quiet to be performed, entering a state of complete dissatisfaction with him, professional and with work, which affects your productivity. These behaviors directly affect the collaborator, who, without realizing it, goes into a destructive cycle and, if not perceived in time, unfortunately, will result in burnout syndrome. Therefore, it is evident in the previous issues how important it is for companies that their leaders have management focused on human capital, understanding that it will be the people who will bring the results.

The research resulted in 111 (54,41%) people feeling that the work environment influence stems from the activities performed, 76 (37,25%) said they felt that excessive market pressure frustrates the performance of a good job, 74 (36,27%) said they had difficulty being creative, when they feel under pressure, 54 (26,47%) report the neutrality they feel of their leader about their health, shown in Table 4.

The questions asked in the questionnaire to verify the influence of the external and internal environment and the concern of the leadership about the health of the employees, being the scale level from 1 (never) to 5 (always). These responses show the influence of the environment on employees’ tasks and denote the importance of leadership in a team, and how much the leader without the human gaze can favor an insecure bond and stagnate productivity. That is, it is important to have measures within the organization, examining the work process, providing better ordering of time and pause for rest and transformation in leadership styles (Silla; Salvador, 1993).

Table 5 shows the numbers used in the calculation, referring to the responses of the discomfort of the external pressure of the market in comparison to the risk of burnout through Pearson’s linear correlation, which allowed to verify the association of the elements, being the result of 0,93%, no normality test was applied. The closer to 1 the result, a strong positive correlation is revealed, thus demonstrating the strong relationship between external pressure and burnout syndrome.

Graph 1 allowed verifying the association of the results of the factors, the closer the orange balls are to the dotted line, the more correlation is revealed to external pressure.

This data brought by research helps to understand why burnout has become a work disease and one of the growing nowadays because as technologies increase, deadlines shorten and pressure in work environments becomes inevitable, we have the challenge of running against time in search of results, this not to mention competitiveness, which becomes increasingly fierce due to globalization, generating dissatisfaction and the feeling that we have never reached our goal, since due to competition, many become insatiable, causing their emotional fatigue, so we see the correlation of competitiveness the burnout syndrome. However, it is noticeable the removal of a ball from the dotted line in the graph, reveals that it is not only competitiveness that influences the emergence of burnout syndrome. Thus, it is up to the leader, to identify the needs of their team and to develop an assertive communicative approach, which facilitates the performance of activities in a healthy way. The objective is to develop a competitive environment that does not corrupt the health of the functionary, but maintains it, being created strategies to reduce difficulties and support professionals, favoring their quality of life inside and outside the company (Moreno et al., 2010).

We asked what sensations the excess of collection causes in professionals the main ones are anxiety 84,80%, stress 78,90%, headache 64,20%, and discouragement 56,90%. This data shows how the excess collection harms the health of the leaders, causing feelings that hinder the concentration and performance of a good job. Leaders should be careful in addressing charging so that it is not excessive and does not cause symptoms that are conducive to burnout syndrome. It is not enough that the leader has the so-called hard skill (technical preparation for a performance of functions), but a leader must develop the soft skill (preparation and social and emotional characteristics), that is, the company needs to have a leadership that sees and cares not only with the results but with the methodology adopted, having the concern with the external and internal environment and how they can influence the health of their employees, having the competences coupled and not as an enemy. Leaders must always seek to develop participatory and active leadership, noting their team members, not only as a number but as someone who deserves to be recognized and validated for their effort, after all, Limongi-França (2004) cites refers to well-being in the direction of maintaining integrity as professional, citizen and person.

Companies must take care of their human capital since burnout can hinder productivity because emotional exhaustion stifles creative capacity and decreases the enthusiasm of the professional, so leadership should favor the innovative thinking of its team. Burnout syndrome can cause clearances and cost more than creating preventive and informational plans. Based on this premise, alternatives were designed to improve working conditions and create a healthier environment, it was suggested and questioned which activities would help in stress relief, the three of which were the most voted: 45,60% sports activities, 42,20% relaxation practices, and 32,40% television. So, the company can think about adopting work gymnastics, a TV room pauses for physical exercises, relaxation practices such as mindfulness (training to focus on the present moment and dealing with challenging situations) insert external agreements such as gym pass (discount system in accredited gyms), once a week gather the team for Zumba classes, among others. All these suggested activities contribute to a good organizational climate and keep the health of the professionals involved more balanced, as they help relieve the stress caused by the natural pressures of the work environment in daily life, such as goals and deadlines that need to be met.

Final considerations

The study allowed us to verify the correlation between market pressure and burnout syndrome, demonstrating the interference of the competitive external environment in the internal organizational environment, investigating the influence of the work environment on work activities, and how the leadership approach, with goals, directly impacts the productivity of employees and interferes in their health.

Competition in the markets creates a competitive environment and with that people become increasingly eager for results, but it is necessary to take care of people, as we try to maintain excellent performances so that there are no higher burnout rates. From this investigation, it was possible to analyze the connection between competitiveness, leadership, and burnout and how leadership needs to consider market pressures and demand in a harmonious way for the health of its team.

When the company starts to have its teams members with symptoms of exhaustion, it is necessary to remediate actions for this issue, but here it is explicit the need to fight the causes, acting with the precaution of the work teams, an example is the time surveys of organizational climate, which will demonstrate how the people of a given company see their leadership and their approach, and given the results, management can and should create plans to avoid having members removed due to health problems, and one of them is burnout.

The research contributed to pointing out actions that can be taken to cause a pleasant workplace and that allow preventing the onset of burnout syndrome. The organization can implement physical activities, relaxation practices, and other conventions that help in stress relief to contribute to maintaining the health of the collaborators.

This discussion is limited to the relationship between the external and internal environment, leadership, and burnout syndrome, the research did not accept contributions of approaches to leaders regarding assertive communication with their leaders. The study was limited in terms of alternatives to maintain the physical and mental health of professionals. Further investigations are needed on the methodology to be inserted by the leaders and the most viable activities for the company in question.

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