Burnout Contagion in Supervisor-Subordinate Dyads

Abstract

Employee burnout has an extensive history in applied psychology, with decades of research and hundreds of studies examining both its antecedents and consequences. Despite these advancements, and although theoretical models of burnout have cited the importance of supervisory behavior as a factor contributing to the deleterious effects of organizational role stressors, little empirical research has systematically measured supervisory burnout in relation to subordinate burnout. Without a thorough understanding of the relationship between supervisor and subordinate burnout organizations may struggle to properly develop intervention strategies aimed at reducing and eliminating burnout within the workforce. Drawing on emotional contagion theory and the interactional psychology framework, this study proposes and tests a model articulating the processes by which supervisor burnout leads to subordinate burnout. Utilizing a sample of 93 supervisor-subordinate dyads, results indicate that supervisor burnout influences subordinate burnout via the emotional contagion process and that subordinate susceptibility to emotional contagion serves as an important individual difference variable that moderates this relationship. Implications for theory and practice as well as future directions are discussed.

The Contagious Leader: A Panel Study on Occupational Stress Transfer in a Large Danish Municipality

“…Studies have pointed out that manager stress may be central to employees' experience of occupational stress over time. However, the few existing studies that employ panel data to investigate stress transfer in manager-employee dyads only estimate contagion effects with time-periods up to three months [26,31,34,35], missing the opportunity to study the length of such effects.…”

“…This pro-social orientation implies that employees empathize to a greater extent with the other party in relationships at work (both with clients and co-workers). In situations where employees show empathy towards a stressed leader, there is a high risk of facilitating the transfer of emotions, as empathy evokes an emotional response to and often mirroring of the other's feelings [21,26]. Furthermore, the majority of employees in local governments (as is the case in this paper) are employed in service delivery which is often intense in emotional labor.…”

“…The few studies that have empirically investigated the relationship between manager and subordinate stress rather consistently support this phenomenon of 'stress contagion' [26,[31][32][33][34][35][36]. However, these studies are often based on time-invariant data (limiting the potential for causal inference) and/or data from a sports-setting (the relevance of which may not travel well to a public sector work context).…”

“…In addition, no studies have, to the best of our knowledge, considered the length of stress contagion effects once first induced. In the existing literature, the longest timespan examined is an interval of three month in two studies by [26,31]. Thus, the question of how long a stress contagion effect takes hold has not been investigated so far, and data collected within a longer timespan (for example intervals of one or more years) have never been examined.…”

How Does Supervisor Burnout Affect Leader-Member Exchange? A Dyadic Perspective

“…This process is referred to as emotional contagion. Research by Bakker et al (2006) and Chullen (2014) provide support for the latter, finding evidence for shared feelings of burnout among employees even after controlling for conditions of the work environment.…”