165 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 3 insisted that emotional exhaustion increases the possibility of reducing one’s personal accomplishment while also directly causing depersonalization. The last dimension, Devaluing Client, is a counselor’s attitude and perception of their relationship with clients. It describes counselors’ callous attitudes toward clients, such as little empathy for, or no concern about, the welfare of their clients. S. M. Lee et al. (2007) reported that the Devaluing Client dimension was positively correlated with the Depersonalization subscale of the MBI, defined as “a negative, cynical, or excessively detached response to other people” (Maslach, 1998, p. 69). Regarding the sequence between Exhaustion and the two dimensions of consequence, we postulated that Devaluing Client is the final stage of the burnout developmental model, suggesting that exhaustion triggers feelings of incompetence first, which in turn results in counselors’ actual behavior of devaluing clients. Emotional and physical exhaustion is a major direct threat to counselors’ competencies in providing quality services to their clients (R. T. Lee & Ashforth, 1993; Park & Lee, 2013; van Dierendonck et al., 2001), while devaluing clients—treating clients as objects—can be viewed as an emotional coping strategy to deal with the frustration derived from emotional depletion (Gil-Monte et al., 1998). Emotional exhaustion may therefore increase counselors’ feelings of incompetence and then exacerbate their detachment from clients to the point where they become callous toward and no longer interested in their clients (R. T. Lee & Ashforth, 1993; Leiter & Maslach, 1988; Taris et al., 2005). Thus, we posited that devaluing clients is the final crucial manifestation of the phenomenon among counselors who have experienced prolonged burnout, leading many of them to consider leaving the counseling profession. In summary, we proposed an integrative process model of counselor burnout that comprises the following stages in sequence: 1) Negative Work Environment, 2) Deterioration in Personal Life, 3) Exhaustion, 4) Incompetence, and 5) Devaluing Client. That is, professional counselors who work in a negative work environment for an extended period may start to experience a deterioration in their personal lives, which could lead counselors to emotional and physical exhaustion. Counselors exposed to prolonged exhaustion may also feel a lack of competence in counseling, which may make them prone to becoming callous toward their clients. Figure 1 depicts this serial process model of counselor burnout. Figure 1 Saturated Model of Counselor Burnout Process Note. NW = Negative Work Environment, DP = Deterioration in Personal Life, EX = Exhaustion, IC = Incompetence, DC = Devaluing Client.
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