
Christina MaslachUniversity of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology
Christina Maslach
Ph.D, 1971, Stanford Univ.
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128
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Introduction
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July 1971 - present
Education
September 1967 - June 1971
September 1963 - June 1967
Publications
Publications (128)
Burnout has a long tradition of studies in the workplace and recently researchers suggested burnout is also rising among university students. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is considered a valid measure of burnout. However, the student version of the MBI (MBI-SS) has received limited empirical support. The aim of this paper is to analyze the f...
Whenever the topic of job burnout gets raised, the key question is often “What can we do about it?” Although many different ideas have been proposed about how to deal with burnout, few of them have ever been implemented or evaluated systematically. Furthermore, there is a bias toward fixing people, rather than fixing the job situation. However, cur...
The concept of burnout, which first attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners in the 1970s, is now recognized as a major social issue in the workplace. A historical review of the development of this concept, in terms of theoretical models and assessment tools, points to the tension between models of greater complexity and effort...
What do we know about burnout, and what can we do about it? This article will provide an overview of what has been learned from current research on burnout, and what are the implications of the key themes that have emerged. One theme involves the critical significance of the social environment in health care settings. A second theme is the challeng...
Latent profile analysis, with two large datasets, was used to identify multiple person-centered profiles across the burnout – engagement continuum, as assessed by the three dimensions of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). Five profiles emerged from this analysis: Burnout (high on all three dimensions), Engagement (low on all three), Overextended...
The experience of burnout has been the focus of much research during the past few decades. Measures have been developed, as have various theoretical models, and research studies from many countries have contributed to a better understanding of the causes and consequences of this occupationally-specific dysphoria. The majority of this work has focus...
Job satisfaction is a surprisingly fragile state. Here's how to protect yourself against the top contributors to burnout
Burnout refers to the emotional depletion and loss of motivation that result from prolonged exposure to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. The Maslach Burnout Inventory ( MBI ) is one of the most widely accepted scales and is composed of the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. With more than 35 years of...
Burnout is a syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism, and diminished professional efficacy closely associated with the work environment. Once established, the syndrome persists. Burnout arises in response to stressors within the work environment. It has a wide range of negative effects on job performance and personal well-being. Burnout stands in contrast...
This article memorializes Harrison Gough (1921-2014), a major leader in the field of personality assessment. Gough's most important contribution to psychology was the development of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), which continues to have immense influence on applied psychology. Further highlights of Gough's career and professional con...
Background:
The role of personal and situational factors in burnout development in the hospital context is well known. The majority of studies used standardized and generic scales and focused exclusively on the individual level of analysis, underestimating the role of teamwork effects.
Objectives:
This study adopted a contextualized and multilev...
The psychological concept of burnout refers to long-term exhaustion from, and diminished interest in, the work we do. It’s a phenomenon that most of us have some understanding of, even if we haven’t always been affected directly. Many people start their working lives full of energy and enthusiasm, but far fewer are able to maintain that level of en...
Burnout research over the past 30 years has yielded both knowledge and tools to apply to interventions at unit
and organizational levels. Examples of innovative partnerships between researchers and practitioners point to
the importance of multi-level approaches in generating relevant and effective solutions to the burnout problem.
The article on “Key Questions Regarding Work Engagement” presents an agenda of 10 propositions for future research on this important topic. However, some conceptual aspects of this agenda might be enhanced by greater consideration of the parallels, as well as of the differences, between work engagement and job burnout. Several recommendations are p...
A personal perspective on the work being done on burnout and engagement calls for a more active focus on developing interventions at social and organizational levels. Preventing burnout can be accomplished by a focus on building engagement and utilizing organizational assessments that include tools for early detection.
Groups with a strong sense of collective efficacy set more challenging goals, persist in the face of difficulty, and are ultimately more likely to succeed than groups who do not share this belief. Given the many advantages that may accrue to groups who are confident, it would be logical to advise groups to build a high level of collective efficacy...
A rigorous quasi-experiment tested the ameliorative effects of a sabbatical leave, a special case of respite from routine work. We hypothesized that (a) respite increases resource level and well-being and (b) individual differences and respite features moderate respite effects. A sample of 129 faculty members on sabbatical and 129 matched controls...
Despite mounting evidence that members of Asian cultures are less likely to engage in behavior that makes them appear distinctive (i.e., individuating behavior) than members of prototypical Western culture, the direct mechanisms through which this effect occurs have not been explored. In the present research, we examined the role of judgments of so...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to focus on the career of the burnout concept itself, rather than reviewing research findings on burnout.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper presents an overview of the concept of burnout.
Findings
– The roots of the burnout concept seem to be embedded within broad social, economic, and cultural develop...
This study tested whether the mediation model of burnout could predict nurses' turnover intentions.
A better understanding of what factors support a commitment to a nursing career could inform both policies and workplace practices. The mediation model of burnout provides a way of linking the quality of a nurse's worklife to various outcomes, such a...
This study investigates the relationship between effort-reward-imbalance (ERI) at work and self-rated health (SF-36) among 941 Las Vegas hotel room cleaners (99% female, 84% immigrant).
Logistic regression models adjust for age, health behaviors, physical workload and other potential confounders.
50% reported ERI and 60% poor or fair general health...
Burnout is recognized as a potential problem within a broad range of occupations, and within many different countries. Much has been written about burnout and there is a continuing drive to identify effective solutions. This article reviews the history of the burnout concept, and the debates about how best to define it and thus measure it. The prim...
A longitudinal study predicted changes in burnout or engagement a year later by identifying 2 types of early indicators at the initial assessment. Organizational employees (N = 466) completed measures of burnout and 6 areas of worklife at 2 times with a 1-year interval. Those people who showed an inconsistent pattern at Time 1 were more likely to c...
Burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. It is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and professional inefficacy. As a reliably identifiable job stress syndrome, burnout clearly places the individual stress experience within a larger organizational context of people's relation t...
Job stress has been recognized as a significant occupational hazard which can impair both health and work performance. The worker's internal experience of stress is assumed to play a mediating role between the impact of external job demands (stressors) and work-related outcomes (such as absenteeism or illness). This basic model should be especially...
This study contrasts the effects of two types of ethnically heterogeneous groups on their enjoyment of and performance on an interactive creative task. The majority of each group was composed of either ethnic minorities or Caucasians. Analyses were conducted using hierarchical linear modeling where appropriate. Teams composed mostly of ethnic minor...
This article is a book review of Burnout Across Thirteen Cultures: Stress and Coping in Child and Youth Care Workers by V. Savicki. It was originally published in the APA journal of book reviews, Contemporary Psychology, which has now been replaced by PsychCRITIQUES. The title of the article was chosen by the editors, not by me, so it may be a bit...
This chapter evaluates a model of the organizational context of burnout with direct reference to a new measure, the Areas of Worklife Scale (AWS). The model proposes a structured framework for considering six areas of worklife – workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values – that have resonated through the literature on burnout over t...
Job burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job and is defined here by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and sense of inefficacy. Its presence as a social problem in many human services professions was the impetus for the research that is now taking place in many countries. That research h...
The authors outline a strategy for introducing a Western psychological construct into a different culture. A series of three studies tested how the construct of individuation functions in a collectivist culture. It was hypothesized that the original one-factor model of individuation would not be sufficient to capture the meaning of individuating be...
Abstract It has been a decade since an international group of scholars came together to discuss and debate the construct of job burnout. That conference, which took place in Krakow, Poland in 1990, was a major turning point in the development of this field. Not only did it bring together a wide range of theoretical perspectives and empirical data,...
Discusses areas of work life where there should be a match between the values of employees and organizations in order to prevent burnout. Effect of the increasing expectations of customers, colleagues and executives on the workload; Link between technological advances and the increased interdependency of people at work; Pros and cons of rewards of...
Sex differences in social support have been explained in terms of gender differences in socialization and personality. The current research focused directly on the link between social support and gender variables. An adult, largely Caucasian sample of both sexes reported an experience in which they had received support, and were assessed on masculi...
Reviews related literature on job burnout. Pioneering and empirical phases of burnout research; Three dimensions of burnout; Job, occupational and organizational characteristics of job burnout; Demographic and personality characteristics of persons experiencing job burnout; Theoretical framework of burnout; Methods in dealing with burnout.
Burnout is a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. The past 25 years of research has established the complexity of the construct, and places the individual stress experience within a larger organizational context of people's rel...
Heutzutage nimmt Burnout unter den Arbeitskräften Nordamerikas fast seuchenartige Ausmaße an. Dies liegt nicht so sehr daran, dass mit uns etwas nicht mehr stimmt, sondern eher daran, dass es fundamentale Veränderungen am Arbeitsplatz und an der Art unserer Berufe gegeben hat. Der heutige Arbeitsplatz ist meist ein kaltes, abweisendes, forderndes U...
Weshalb wartet man also darauf, dass Burnout auftritt, ehe man etwas Konstruktives dagegen unternimmt? Weshalb beschäftigt man sich nicht mit dem Problem, solange es klein und noch nicht bedeutend ist? Wie wir in Kapitel vier festgestellt haben, ist das Vorbeugen gegen Burnout nicht nur ein ehrenwertes Ziel — vielmehr ist es wirtschaftlich sinnvoll...
In der heutigen Arbeitswelt sind wirtschaftliche Werte die primäre Triebkraft, alles andere ist ihnen untergeordnet. Obwohl sich diese Betonung der wirtschaftlichen Werte auf die Menschen auswirkt, werden menschliche Anliegen nur dann direkt berücksichtigt, wenn sie wirtschaftlich einen Vorteil bringen. Konflikte am Arbeitsplatz, Arbeitsüberlastung...
Eine Umfrage in einem Unternehmen kann helfen, die Auswirkung von größeren Umstrukturierungsprozessen auf die Arbeitnehmer zu ermitteln. Die Ergebnisse einer solchen Umfrage geben Aufschluss über die Bandbreite der Auffassungen des Personals zu kritischen Themen. Sie zeigen die Bereiche, in denen die Organisation im Vergleich zu ähnlichen Organisat...
Es gilt zwar als sicher, dass Burnout ein Problem am Arbeitsplatz ist, nicht jeder ist jedoch davon überzeugt, dass es ein Problem darstellt, das ernst genommen werden muss. Aus verschiedenen Gründen wird Burnout heruntergespielt oder als Teil des Arbeitslebens angesehen, der unvermeidlich ist, aber doch bewältigt werden kann.
Im vorhergehenden Kapitel haben wir uns damit beschäftigt, wie sich die von Burnout betroffenen Menschen fühlen, was in ihnen vorgeht. Als Nächstes werden wir uns die Frage stellen, was nun wirklich die Ursachen von Burnout sind. Wie wir gesehen haben, liegen die Ursachen für Burnout mehr im Arbeitsumfeld als beim einzelnen Menschen. Genauer ausged...
Wenn man Menschen fragt, wie man sich fühlt, wenn man an Burnout leidet, wird man wahrscheinlich Folgendes zur Antwort bekommen:
„Ich bin frustriert! Es ist unmöglich für mich, gute Arbeit zu leisten und die Situation verschlimmert sich immer mehr.“ „Ich habe meine Begeisterung für eine Arbeit, die ich wirklich gerne getan habe, verloren.“
Scheinen die Dinge bei der Arbeit auf eine Krisensituation hinauszulaufen? Wird Burnout zum ernst zu nehmenden Problem? Scheint die Situation unkontrollierbar? Wünschen Sie sich manchmal, dass jemand etwas dagegen unternehmen würde? Fassen Sie Mut — es gibt Wege, wie ein Einzelner Schritte gegen Burnout unternehmen kann, und diese Person könnten gu...
The goal of the present study was to demonstrate the value of a multiple data analytic approach for testing the cross-cultural generalizability of a personality measure. Data were collected in four different countries (Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United States) on the Big Five Questionnaire (BFQ), which is a measure of the Five Factor Model of p...
'Burnout' was first investigated in the 1970s as a crisis of overextended and disillusioned human service workers. But the nature of the syndrome has changed with the evolutions in the nature of these professions. The current experience of burnout is lived out in a more difficult social context, with human service workers struggling harder for soci...
'Burnout' was first investigated in the 1970s as a crisis of overextended and disillusioned human service workers. But the nature of the syndrome has changed with the evolutions in the nature of these professions. The current experience of burnout is lived out in a more difficult social context, with human service workers struggling harder for soci...
Burnout research has considered a wide range of organizational correlates of burnout. It is argued that integrating these various organizational qualities into a comprehensive model of organizational environments will further research on burnout. The primary themes in burnout research fit readily into six areas of worklife; workload, control, rewar...
Job burnout has long been recognized as a problem that leaves once-enthusiastic professionals feeling drained, cynical, and ineffective. This article proposes two new approaches to the prevention of burnout that focus on the interaction between personal and situational factors. The first approach, based on the Maslach multidimensional model, focuse...
During the past two decades, the nature of work has changed dramatically, as more and more organizations downsize, outsource and move toward short-term contracts, part-time working and teleworking. The costs of stress in the workplace in most of the developed and developing world have risen accordingly in terms of increased sickness absence, labour...
Burnout is a type of prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. It has been long recognized as a serious problem for people who work in interpersonally oriented occupations, such as the human services. This article presents a multidimensional model of burnout and its healthy alternative, work engagement. It anal...
Peer-led, school-based interventions show promise for preventing AIDS among adolescents, but little is known about the processes underlying effective peer education or the conditions that promote its efficacy. This study examined the implementation in one school of an effective, peer-led AIDS prevention program for inner-city 7th-grade participants...
Peer‐led, school‐based interventions show promise for preventing AIDS among adolescents, but little is known about the processes underlying effective peer education or the conditions that promote its efficacy. This study examined the implementation in one school of an effective, peer‐led AIDS prevention program for inner‐city 7th‐grade participants...
Describes 2 studies that were conducted respectively to examine the validity of the Italian version of the Individuation Scale ([IS], C. Maslach et al, 1985) and to investigate individuation within the frame of the Five Factor Model of personality. In Exp 1, 887 Ss (aged 18–62 yrs) completed the IS and combined personality questionnaires. In Exp 2,...
This study was designed to examine the hands of unprimed constructs people use in an openended social perception task (Kelly Rep Test, Kelly, 1955). Three samples of subjects used their own natural categories or person schemes in judgments of familiar others. Results indicated that whereas the most prevalently used constructs with familiar others a...
This second version of the MBI was designed for use by educators, and was originally published in 1986 by CPP. It is now published and distributed online by Mind Garden (www.mindgarden.com/products/mbi.htm)
This third version of the MBI was developed across several occupations and countries, in order to assess burnout in all occupations. It was originally published in 1996 by CPP, but is now published and distributed online by Mind Garden (www.mindgarden.com/products/mbi.htm)
This is the original version of the MBI, published in 1981 by CPP. It is now published and distributed online by Mind Garden [www.mindgarden.com/products/mbi.htm
The Maslact Burnout Inventory (MBI) is a copyrighted instrument that must be obtained directly from the publisher, Mindgarden, Inc. For details about how to obtain the MBI and its Manual, please visit the Mindgarden website using the link shown below.
MINDGARDEN WEBSITE FOR MBI: http://www.mindgarden.com/117-maslach-burnout-inventory?utm_source=MB...
The present research examined relations between individuation, the willingness to publicly differentiate oneself from others, and three dimensions that may lead to high social impact: creativity, leadership, and nonverbal expressiveness. Study 1 describes the development of a Q-sort prototype of the high individuator. In Study 2 the prototype was u...
The present research examined relations between individuation, the willingness to publicly differentiate oneself from others, and three dimensions that may lead to high social impact: creativity, leadership, and nonverbal expressiveness. Study 1 describes the development of a Q-sort prototype of the high individuator. In Study 2 the prototype was u...
This longitudinal study examined relations among interpersonal demands of jobs and the psychological health, job and work involvements, and job satisfaction of workers. Two samples of archival data were collected between the 1940s and 1971. Workers of both sexes who were psychologically healthier in adolescence and earlier adulthood manifested grea...
It has been almost twenty years since the term "burnout" first appeared in the psychological literature. The phenomenon that was portrayed in those early articles had not been entirely unknown, but had been rarely acknowledged or even openly discussed. In some occupations, it was almost a taboo topic, because it was considered tantamount to admitti...
Biological sex has been assumed to be a basic category that importantly influences perceptions people have of others. However, it has recently been proposed that there are individual differences in this presumed generic propensity to use sex in person perception — that some people have schemas with regard to sex and gender, whereas others do not. P...
Organizational commitment and burnout were related to interpersonal relationships of nurses in a small general hospital. Regular communication contacts among personnel were differentiated as supervisor or coworker contact, and these categories were further differentiated into pleasant and unpleasant contacts. The results were consistent with a view...
Surveyed 38 rehabilitation counselors to investigate the relationship of experienced burnout to self-concept and job setting. Ss completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory and a questionnaire about their work. The emotional exhaustion component of burnout emerged as the key factor in the results. Emotional exhaustion was related to work overload and a...
The affective variables of job satisfaction and burnout, as experienced in an employing organization, were studied with respect to their relationship to the quality of life in a family organization. Affective measures were obtained from employees working in social services, whereas the assessment of the quality of life was obtained from their spous...
An experimental analysis of dissenting and conforming behavior in small groups revealed a significant interaction between personality and situational variables. Individual differences in gender role and in willingness to be "individuated" were predictive of subjects' choices to disagree or agree with the opinions of other group members. However, th...
The six articles in this special issue on burnout are critically reviewed. The shortcomings of these articles, both conceptual and empirical, limit the contributions that this special issue can make to our understanding of burnout.
stress [definitions, sources, outcomes, coping]
job stress / burnout syndrome / workaholic syndrome
treatment approaches (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Reviews the literature on public individuation, in which people choose to act differently than others, which is an important process in interpersonal behavior that has received little attention from researchers. A new individual difference measure, the Individual Scale, is proposed. The scale is designed to assess people's willingness to engage in...
Two survey studies were conducted to assess the relationship of demographic variables to the experience of job burnout. Contrary to earlier hypotheses that women are more vulnerable to this form of job stress, the results show that women do slightly better than men. However, this difference is rather small, which suggests that the sex of the employ...
Describes an ongoing series of studies by the authors, begun in 1973, that concern the concept of employee burnout, which is characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. The development of the concept, early research, and the rationale for choosing the helping professions for studying burnout are di...
118 undergraduates expressed their opinions about 20 scenarios that described problems in human relations. Some Ss heard 3 confederates agreeing on a solution to each problem. Ss could either conform or they could dissent by choosing other available solutions or generating one of their own. From a self-presentational perspective, private self-consc...
In recent years, the unique stress experienced by those who do ‘people work’ has been acknowledged by the helping professions as a widespread problem and has been recognized by social scientists as a topic requiring systematic research. This paper begins by briefly reviewing research on the type of job stress experienced by workers in the helping p...