Verified by 
Key points
- Burnout is when you have high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and low levels of personal accomplishment.
- The two strongest relationships between personality traits and burnout are extroversion and neuroticism.
- Resting from an environment designed to foster burnout only puts a small stopper in it. It doesn’t curtail or prevent it.
Burnout is more than just hating your job. It’s a multidimensional construct consisting of three separate but related dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced feelings of personal accomplishment.
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 are 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.
How Personality Can Put You at Risk of Burnout
Are some people more prone to burnout than others? Here, 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 Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. (This can be simplified into the acronym OCEAN to help you remember them.)
What I found is that emotional exhaustion has been found to be negatively related to extraversion and positively associated with neuroticism. This often manifests as 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 and tend to hold things inside while contending with your anxiety. Due to this, you often do things without considering the full consequences of your behavior.
Depersonalization, by contrast, has been found to be positively related to neuroticism and negatively associated with agreeableness. This dimension may manifest in you distancing yourself from your work by creating dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers. This can foster anxious thoughts about others and how they perceive you, cause you to feel skeptical about the motives of your coworkers, or lead you to 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 can manifest as self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement at work—and even if you’re outgoing, sociable, and try to connect with others in a calm and confident manner, you may not 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 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. Taking a momentary step back from an environment designed to foster burnout only puts a small stopper in it—it doesn’t curtail or prevent it.
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. It’s very much a pay-now-or-later issue.
If you believe your particular personality could be putting you at an increased risk of burnout, a therapist could help you both identify your at-risk characteristics and those that could help insulate you from the negative effects of burnout.
To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
Facebook/LinkedIn image: DimaBerlin/Shutterstock
References
Alarcon, G., Eschleman, K. J., & Bowling, N. A. (2009). Relationships between personality variables and burnout: A meta-analysis. Work & stress, 23(3), 244-263.
Kim, L. E., Jörg, V., & Klassen, R. M. (2019). A meta-analysis of the effects of teacher personality on teacher effectiveness and burnout. Educational psychology review, 31(1), 163-195.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2008). The truth about burnout: How organizations cause personal stress and what to do about it. John Wiley & Sons.
Maslach, C., Jackson, S. E., & Leiter, M. P. (1997). Maslach burnout inventory. Scarecrow Education.
Piedmont, R. L. (1993). A longitudinal analysis of burnout in the health care setting: The role of personal dispositions. Journal of personality assessment, 61(3), 457-473.
Grist, C. L., & Caudle, L. A. (2021). An examination of the relationships between adverse childhood experiences, personality traits, and job-related burnout in early childhood educators. Teaching and Teacher Education, 105, 103426.
Valcour, M. (2016). Beating burnout. Harvard Business Review, 94(11), 98-101.
