Burnout: Moving beyond the status quo.

By Renzo Bianchi, I. Schonfeld, É. Laurent. International Journal of Stress Management, 2017

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Burnout has been defined as a job-induced syndrome combining emotional exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism, and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment. In this article, we expand on past analyses of burnout by reviewing key, yet overlooked, problems affecting the construct. We concomitantly examine the implications of these problems for the overall validity of burnout research. Our work shows that burnout research is undermined by 4 main problems. First, what constitutes a case of burnout is unclear. Second, the basic conceptualization and operationalization of burnout are ill aligned. Third, burnout is unlikely to be the specifically job-induced syndrome it has been posited to be. Fourth, the discriminant validity of the burnout construct is unsatisfactory. These fundamental problems, disregarded for decades, render burnout research inconclusive. This state of affairs (a) bears on researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to monitor and protect workers’ health and (b) prevents public health policymakers from producing authoritative recommendations. The burnout construct thus appears to not well serve the goal of promoting occupational health. The depression construct may offer occupational health specialists a way out of the “burnout impasse.” Depression is diagnosable. Like burnout, depression can be studied dimensionally (i.e., as a process) and examined from both an individual and a social standpoint. Methods for investigating the etiological link between depressive symptoms and disorders and job stress are available.

Subfields: General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b341c1ebca1a19f8c13921d69199655150c43569

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In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT)—Development, Validity, and Reliability (2020, background): “Although burnout is heavily researched, with over 80,000 publications on the topic [40], its operationalization is one of the least-investigated topics in burnout research [59] and continues to be debated [60].”
Is Burnout a Depressive Condition? A 14-Sample Meta-Analytic and Bifactor Analytic Study (2021, background): “of affairs is that no reliable prevalence estimates can be produced when relying on the burnout construct (Bianchi et al., 2019; Schwenk & Gold, 2018).”