Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement

Summary & key facts

This open review explains burnout as a gradual response to long-term work stress that can harm thinking, feelings, and attitudes. It describes common causes, effects, ways to measure burnout, and actions to prevent or reduce it. The review highlights three main parts of burnout—emotional exhaustion, detachment or cynicism, and feeling less effective at work—and notes that COVID-19 raised attention to burnout, especially in healthcare workers, but that comparing rates before and after the pandemic is hard because baseline data are often missing.

Key facts:

• Burnout is defined in the review as an individual response to chronic workplace stress that can become long-lasting and affect cognition, emotions, and attitudes.
• The review lists three widely used dimensions of burnout: emotional exhaustion (feeling drained), cynicism or depersonalization (detachment or indifference toward work and people served), and reduced professional achievement (feeling less e
• A cited national study of US general surgery residents showed burnout estimates ranged from 3.2% to 91.4% depending on the definition used, and 43.2% of respondents reported experiencing burnout symptoms weekly.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) included burnout in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as a phenomenon specific to the workplace.
• The review notes that burnout was first studied in care professions but later found to occur across many kinds of jobs, not only in caregiving roles.
• Longitudinal studies summarized in the review suggest a pattern where high emotional exhaustion tends to lead to higher cynicism or depersonalization, though authors say the dimensions are not fully settled.
• The COVID-19 pandemic increased research on burnout and put extra psychological strain on healthcare workers, but the review cautions that lack of pre-pandemic baseline data makes it hard to measure true changes in prevalence.
• The review describes alternative models and subtypes, for example an extended model that groups burnout into exhaustion, mental distance (cynicism/depersonalization), and professional inefficacy, and a subtype model that views burnout as ev

Abstract

A growing body of empirical evidence shows that occupational health is now more relevant than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This review focuses on burnout, an occupational phenomenon that results from chronic stress in the workplace. After ...

Topics

Healthcare professionals’ stress and burnout Stress and Burnout Research Workplace Health and Well-being

Categories

General Health Professions Health Professions Health Sciences

Tags

Applied psychology Artificial intelligence Biology Botany Burnout Clinical psychology Computer science Emotional exhaustion Identification (biology) Occupational burnout Occupational stress Perspective (graphical) Psychology