Employee Burnout and Retention Among Human Resource Professionals: A Mini Literature Review

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Compassion Fatigue and Retention Among Human Resource Professionals

in Local Government Organizations: A Problem Statement

Gabrielle McNeely

PSY 7015

Capella University

Vincent Jeevar

June 21, 2026

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Problem Statement

As employees of public institutions with limited budgets, resources, and staff, HR

professionals have a significant challenge in local government organizations as they need to

work as employee advocates, policy enforcers and crisis responders. While HR tasks are integral

to municipal and county operations, little research has been done to understand the psychological

impact of this care-giving related work on HR practitioners themselves, especially in the public

sector. The issue under investigation concerns the connection between compassion fatigue

(emotional and physical fatigue as a result of the repeated exposure to other people's distress)

and HR professionals' retention in local government agencies. Local governments often

experience disciplinary issues, layoffs, union grievances and citizen complaints at a higher rate

than the private sector, and their human resource staff often take the emotional burden of such

actions, all while facing more extreme budget restrictions, political oversight, and staffing levels.

There is little empirical research that examines the potential for such a unique occupational

context to increase HR employees' compassion fatigue, and the impact of this compassion

fatigue on the willingness to depart from the profession.

Literature primarily has focused on helping professionals in healthcare and social work

environments and the relationship between indirect trauma exposure and burnout is well

established with a robust meta-analytic literature (Cieslak et al., 2014). A growing and emerging

stream of research has now examined HR more generally, and has confirmed that HR is often a

source of stress for HR and not much of a buffer to it (Johnstone, 2024). Secondary traumatic

stress among helping professionals has also been linked to protective factors, like supervisory

support, peer connection, and a positive organizational climate (Whittenbury et al., 2025). But

none of this research has specifically considered the meaningfully different burnout path that

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might occur in public sector and local government human resource contexts, where chronic

understaffing, civil service constraints, political accountability and limited compensation

structures could have a different impact. It is an obvious gap in the literature that little is known

of whether compassion fatigue appears differently in the local government HR community or

whether organizational interventions that have been identified as having an impact in the private

industry and in other helping professions are effective in local government, which is regulated by

civil service rules and has elected oversight.

There are at least two reasons why it's worthwhile investigating this problem. First, local

governments are already facing record levels of turnover and ongoing challenges in filling HR

positions, and the loss of experienced HR professionals can have significant institutional costs,

including the loss of institutional knowledge, recruitment costs, and flawed service to employees

and citizens who rely on working HR systems. Second, compassion fatigue among HR

professionals has implications for the wider workforce, impacting on organizational culture,

employee management and corporate legal and ethical compliance, which all share in the

responsibility of protecting the welfare of employees and the general public they serve.

Understanding the impact of compassion fatigue on local government HR professionals'

intention to leave an organization and what organizational interventions might reduce the risk of

compassion fatigue would give public sector leaders evidence-based, ethically sound strategies to

help keep a critical part of the local government community from leaving the profession.

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References

Cieslak, R., Shoji, K., Douglas, A., Melville, E., Luszczynska, A., & Benight, C. C. (2014). A

meta-analysis of the relationship between job burnout and secondary traumatic stress

among workers with indirect exposure to trauma. Psychological Services, 11(1), 75–86.

https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030698

Johnstone, S. (2024). When the caregivers need care: The silent stress of human resources work.

Administrative Sciences, 14(11), Article 284. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci14110284

Whittenbury, K., Clark, S. L., Brooks, M., Murphy, T., Turner, M. J., & Fawcett, H. (2025).

Strengths for helping professionals exposed to secondary trauma: A scoping review.

Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 26(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241309371