The impact of national culture on burnout and commitment among architectural students: comparison between Hong Kong and Australia

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of national culture on architectural students’ experience of burnout and their commitment to the architecture program. The burnout and commitment profile, and the link between burnout and commitment will be compared between samples of Hong Kong and Australian architectural students. Burnout is defined as students’ emotional exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy to their study. Professional commitment is defined in this study as students’ affective, normative and cost-of-leaving tie to the architecture program. Burnout and professional commitment are both cultural products. The profile of burnout or commitment varies across cultures, which constructs the society’s cultural symbols. There are, however, few studies examining burnout and professional commitment in the cultural level. Noting this gap, the issue of cultural difference in terms of burnout and commitment profiles will be explored in the cultural level. Samples in this study are identified as architectural students in Australia and Hong Kong. The two places fall into two of the five distinct culture regions identified by Schwartz (1999) cultural value theory, i.e. the English-Speaking Cluster and the Far East cluster. In terms of Hofstede’s (1980) classical model, the Hong Kong culture is characterized with low IDV, low UAI and high PDI, while the Australian culture scores the opposite. It is hypothesized that Hong Kong architectural students have lower efficacy and lower level of professional commitment than their Australian counterpart. Diminishing commitment has been reported to be one of the consequences of burnout. In this study the link between burnout and commitment is expected to be stronger among the Australian sample than that of the Hong Kong sample.