Investigating the temporal relationship between proactive burnout prevention and burnout: A four‐wave longitudinal study

Abstract

Given the detrimental effects of burnout for individuals and organizations, it is of crucial importance to better understand the self-initiated actions employees take to prevent burnout. While such proactive burnout prevention is likely to reduce burnout complaints, these activities may also be frustrated by high burnout levels. This means that proactive burnout prevention and burnout can negatively affect each other over time. The present study used a four-wave longitudinal panel design to investigate temporal relationships between proactive burnout prevention and burnout over 3, 6 and 9 weeks. Participants were 165 employees in the financial services industry who provided data on all four measurement occasions. The outcomes of structural equation modelling provided support for the hypothesized combined effects model compared to the lagged and reversed effects models. The findings suggest that proactive burnout prevention can help to prevent burnout, while engagement in these behaviours may be hindered by high initial levels of burnout. Employees should therefore intervene before their resource pool becomes too depleted and they lack the energy or mental strength to invest resources, in order to proactively retain or regain resources. K E Y W O R D S burnout, prevention, proactive behaviours, temporal relationship 1 | INTRODUCTION Burnout has deleterious consequences for individuals' health and wellbeing and organizational outcomes (e.g., Maslach et al., 2001; Salvagioni et al., 2017), indicating the need for burnout prevention.Burnout refers to a work-related state of exhaustion that is characterized by of extreme tiredness, cognitive and emotional impairment, and mental distancing (De Beer et al., 2020;Schaufeli et al., 2019).Whereas burnout prevention interventions initiated by the employer have previously been studied (Awa et al., 2010;Maricuţoiu et al., 2016), less is known about the self-initiated actions employees can take to prevent burnout (Demerouti, 2015). This is remarkable, since the consequences of burnout for individuals physical health and psychological wellbeing can be detrimental (e.g., Type 2 diabetes, depression; Salvagioni et al., 2017) Therefore, it is important to improve our understanding of employees' proactive actions to prevent burnout. Meta-analytical reviews have shown that employerinitiated burnout prevention programs have a lasting, yet small effect This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

The State of Job Burnout Amongst New Zealand Managers: Implications for Employment Relations

“…Similarly, several causes are positively related to burnout, including various job demands and workaholism (Sakakibara et al, 2020), job insecurity (Nellestijn, 2019), and perfectionism concerns (Spangnoli et al, 2021). Recent work (Otto et al, 2021a(Otto et al, , 2021b has shown proactive burnout prevention, self-efficacy, and optimism were negatively related to burnout. Finally, De Beer et al ( 2020) investigated the measurement invariance of the BAT using seven different cross-national representative samples, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Finland, and Japan.…”

Burnt to a crisp? Understanding drivers of burnout amongst New Zealand workers

“…Dispositional factors are also related, with workaholism positively related to burnout (Sakakibara et al , 2020), as is perfectionism concerns (Spangnoli et al , 2021). Otto et al (2021a, b) found towards burnout, that self-efficacy and optimism were negatively related. Hence, the job burnout constructs operates as we would expect.…”

“…Hence, COR theory is useful in the study of burnout because it highlights that an employee needs more resources to manage the challenges of the workplace, and those that do not have sufficient resources, might be more likely to experience hight burnt-out risk. COR theory has been used to explain burnout using the BAT construct (see Otto et al , 2021a; Urbanaviciute et al , 2021). Further, it is a core theory associated with job burnout research more generally (e.g.…”

The ripple effect of strain in times of change: how manager emotional exhaustion affects team psychological safety and readiness to change

“…As such, laissez-faire leadership may produce the opposite effect by increasing the adversity in teams ( Neves and Schyns, 2018 ; Otto et al, 2018 ). Indeed, the neglect of managers may deprive teams of significant resources ( Robert and Vandenberghe, 2022 ; Edmondson and Bransby, 2023 ) that enable the development of psychological safety.…”