What Makes Pastors Unhealthy?

I came across a fairly recent article by Little, Simmons, and Nelson (2007) in the Journal of Management Studies (one of the top management journals in the world) which reported a study on the leaders' psychological health. The title of the article is Health Among Leaders: Positive and Negative Affect, Engagement, and Burnout, Forgiveness, and Revenge. What is unique about the study is that it utilized pastors as its sample.

Ninety four all-male pastors from various congregations belonging to a denomination in a five-state region in the US participated and completed the survey questionnaire. Nearly 40% were senior pastors; the rest were pastors, exec pastors, worship pastors, youth pastors, etc. Hierarchical regression analyses were employed to analyze the data obtained from completed questionnaires which measure family-work conflict (family interferes with work-related responsibilities), work-family conflict (work interferes with family-related responsibilities), negative affect, positive affect, burnout, engagement, revenge behavior, forgiveness behavior, and perception of health.

The purpose of the study is to examine the positive psychological state engagement, the negative psychological state burnout, the positive behavior forgiveness, and the negative behavior revenge and their influence on the leaders' health. The study was based on the assumption that the health of a leader has significant effects on the organization, its members, and the leader him/herself.

To cut to the chase, their studies found the following points:

1. Only two of six variables that were hypothesized to predict health (positive affect and revenge behavior) were statistiscally significant predictors of health. What it means is as follows.

2. Positive Affect (PA) was found to be positively and significantly related to health. PA reflects the extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, active, and alert at work and derives pleasure from their general work environment and responsibilities. This study confirmed previous finding that a leader's PA level does affect his or her psychological health and effective functioning.

3. Revenge behavior was another factor that significantly predicts health, but in a negative way. The study used the definion of revenge as "the infliction of harm in return for a perceived wrong" (Bradfield and Aquino, 1999). The pastors were asked to think back over the last six months when another person offended them, then to write a few sentences describing the offence prior to completing the measure on revenge behavior which has the following items:
- I told them something was wrong with them
- I tried to make something bad happen to them
- I did something to make them get what they deserved
- I got even with them
- I prayed for God to deal severely with them

Interestingly, contrary to common belief, burnout was not significantly and negatively related to health. More interestingly, while the pastors in this study engaged in (thankfully) very little revenge behavior, when they did it even in a small degree it had a major negative impact on their health.

Another finding worth considering is that while work-family and family-work conflicts do not have a direct relationship with health, they are positively related to revenge behavior. Thus, when the pastor is being called at night to meet with bereaved families, hence miss his family time, the propensity to engage others in great emotional intensity (revenge) increases. Similarly, when the pastor's child complains that his dad is always absent from his soccer game because of ministry duties, the pastor is likely to respond vengefully towards the child (e.g., "There is nothing I can do about this. I am a pastor - don't you understand?")

The lessons are clear. If pastors want to maintain their psychological health, they need to ensure that (1) they really need to enjoy their work immensely as a matter of delight (not duty) and (2) guard their hearts against the raw emotions that might erupt as a result of the conflicts they have with their family and the congregations no matter how insignificant they may appear to be in the first place.