Do You Have a Burnout

Personality?
Learn about the personality traits that increase
your risk for burnout.
Posted September 15, 2022 Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

Source: Pexels/nataliya vaitkevich

Burnout is when you have high levels of emotional exhaustion and

depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment. It’s more
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 than just hating your job. Burnout is a multidimensional construct
consisting of three separate but related dimensions that include
emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal
accomplishment.

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Emotional exhaustion comes from feelings of tension and frustration

due to your fears that you will be unable to sustain your past levels of
work performance. This internalized stress saps your energy to
consider adaptive alternatives. You’re just too exhausted to think
differently.

Depersonalization is when you distance yourself from your work by

creating dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers. By
doing this, you create barriers in an effort to lessen some of the
negative outcomes you’re experiencing at work.

Lastly, (reduced) personal accomplishment, which is when you have

self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement at
work. This is a component of the imposter syndrome, which is when
you doubt your skills, abilities, or achievements and possess a chronic
internalized fear of being “found out” that you’re really a fraud.

These three dimensions, which were assessed using the Maslach

Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1997), are
corrosive to your work life, and the more burnt out you are, the greater
the likelihood it spills into your home life and personal relationships.
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 Source: nataliya vaitkevich/Pexels

To answer his question, I discuss these three dimensions of burnout

from a personality perspective based on the research (Alarcon,
Eschleman, & Bowling, 2009; Grist, & Caudle, 2021; Kim, Jörg, &
Klassen, 2019; Piedmont, 1993).

I use the Five-Factor Model of personality, which includes (show

image): Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. This can be simplified into an
acronym, OCEAN to help you remember them.

Emotional exhaustion has been found to be negatively related to

extraversion and positively associated with neuroticism. This manifests
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 with feelings of tension and frustration due to your fears that you will be
unable to sustain your past levels of work performance, so you seek
out solitude, tend to hold things inside while contending with your
anxiety, anxious thoughts, and due to this, you become prone to
actions without considering the full consequences that come from your
behavior.

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Depersonalization has been found to be positively related to

neuroticism and negatively associated with agreeableness. This
manifests as you distancing yourself from your work by creating
dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers. This results
in you experiencing anxiety and anxious thoughts about them and how
they perceive you, and this can cause you to feel skeptical about the
motives of your coworkers and feel like they may be up to something,
and you become cognitively intractable to alternative viewpoints. No
matter what anyone says, you cannot be convinced otherwise.

(Reduced) personal accomplishment has been found to be positively

associated with extraversion and negatively related to neuroticism. This
manifests as you having self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and
lack of achievement at work, and even though you’re outgoing,
sociable, and try to connect with others in a calm and confident
manner, you don’t see the social fruits of your labor. This causes
anxiety and a pervasive sense of uneasiness.

The Greatest Personality Link to Burnout

The two strongest relationships between personality traits and burnout

are extraversion and neuroticism. Burnout is not a singular issue, and
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 just taking more time to relax has not been found to be highly effective
in decreasing burnout (Maslach & Leiter, 2008). Burnout is systemic
and must be seen and treated that way. Taking more days off is just not
enough. Resting from an environment designed to foster burnout only
puts a small stopper in it, doesn’t curtail or prevent it.

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Employers, supervisors, and employees must realize that cultures need

to change to combat burnout to maximize the power of the personnel
they have, or they’ll have higher absenteeism and more employees
using health insurance for chronic stress-related issues, which
increases premiums. It’s very much a pay now or later issue.

Burnout Essential Reads

If you believe you may possess those personality characteristics that
put you at an increased likelihood of burnout, it is best to see a
psychologist who can perform testing to assess not only those
characteristics that put you at risk for burnout but can also identify
those traits that insolate you from it.

To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy

Directory.
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