Toxic Work: How to Overcome Stress, Overload and Burnout and Revitalize Your Career (Paperback)

by Barbara Bailey Reinhold (Author) "Harvard Business School professor Louis "By" Barnes believes in having honest dialogue about life in organizations..." (more)
Key Phrases: career log, toxic work, Recurrent Career Adversity Syndrome, United States, Robert Ader (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Could the dramatic changes and burdensome responsibilities common to the business world these days literally be making you sick? Barbara Bailey Reinhold, director of career development and adjunct professor of psychology at Smith College, believes factors ranging from ever-escalating workloads to the constant threat of downsizing may actually be poisoning employment environments and causing us to fall ill. In Toxic Work: How to Overcome Stress, Overload, and Burnout and Revitalize Your Career, she cites examples of those who have "detoxified" their workplaces in order to help readers make their own 9-to-5 lives healthier and more productive.

From Publishers Weekly
This targeted, practical manual gets down to brass tacks from its opening sentence: "An estimated twenty million Americans are staying in jobs they hate in order to keep their health insurance-when research indicates that career dissatisfaction is more likely than anything else to make them need to use it." Reinhold, a business consultant as well as director of career development and adjunct professor of psychology at Smith College, points out that there are plenty of good reasons for dissatisfaction in today's work force. Having begun by taking employee complaints at face value, she proceeds to offer concrete, sensible suggestions for alleviating them. While citing cases of work-induced health problems ranging from bronchitis to overweight, she illustrates how there is hope for even the most beleaguered worker in today's high-pressure business environment. What is most important, she stresses, is to identify what is really bugging you-whether it's anxiety, anger or lack of self-confidence-then take steps to allay those feelings and regain a sense of control over your life. To these ends she offers a variety of probing self-tests, illuminating case histories and sequenced, focused suggestions for transforming workplace problems into opportunities for growth. Footnotes and an extensive bibliography add to the riches. BOMC, Money Book Club and QPB featured alternate.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Plume (August 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452272750
• ISBN-13: 978-0452272750
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #824,562 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Work is Less Toxic Now, February 28, 2000

By	Geoff (Marlborough, MA USA) - See all my reviews

Toxic Work is the first reference book in the career section which has a bibliography worth reading. The book not only does all the work for you by collecting and organizing relevent resources, but provides a wealth of examples. The author doesn't give pat answers, but takes the reader through the problem-solving process. I found the book empowering because it provides the structure and information I needed to generate a successful game plan. I became proactive, and am happily employed at the same job that sent me to the book store looking for an escape.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gearing Up to Survive Abusive Work is Not Enough, June 13, 1998

By A Customer

This book is quite typical of career guides that take the corporate reality as a given and recommend career change (or worse, job hopping) as the solution to abusive work.

The reader should checkout _Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It_ by Judith Wyatt in order to truly survive abusive work that can't be avoided by job hopping---because work abuse is everywhere.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good starting point for disatisfied workers, August 3, 1998

By A Customer

TOXIC WORK is broken down into two sections. The first section is devoted to "Recognizing and Managing Toxic Work" while the second is devoted to "Making Major Changes: Designing a Nontoxic Life." Overall, the book surveys the major topics of career disatisfaction with an eye towards recognizing when such disatisfaction causes physical affects. It does not get very deep into possible solutions. Instead, the author prefers to continually recommend that anything more in-depth requires professional counselling. On the contrary, I kept feeling the book could have gone further and that it stopped just when things were getting juicy. I also felt that it was padded with a lot extra examples. Despite these flaws, I consider it to be a good tool to help anyone who is currently less that satisfied with their career. It covers such a broad range of issues that everyone should be able to come away from it with some positive ideas about what to do next an! d some new insights about themselves and their career.