Exhaustion and job satisfaction among internal and external outplacement counsellors.

When organisations make employees redundant, they increasingly offer outplacement counselling to them, either in-house or as a service of specialised companies. Despite outplacement counsellors' importance, their work-related stress has not been studied yet. In this paper we argue that internal (in-house) outplacement counsellors have a particularly demanding job (especially because being employed by firing organisations should increase role conflicts among internal outplacement counsellors) and they should thus be more emotionally exhausted than external outplacement counsellors. Data from 98 German outplacement counsellors supported this argumentation. Mediation analyses showed that these differences were mediated by increased role conflicts, consistent with role theory arguments. The same effect was found for counsellors' job satisfaction. These results help understanding the stress that outplacement counsellors experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]