Shirom-melamed Burnout Model and Measure (smbm)

Burnout has received increased research attention in recent years. During the period of 1995-2002, annually about 150 articles that concerned burnout have appeared in journals covered by PsychInfo. As evident, burnout has been a major focus of researchers' efforts. A recent review of the area of burnout (Schuafeli & Enzmann, 1998) found about 5,500 entries with burnout as a key word between 1975 and 1995. Notwithstanding this large number of studies, the relationships between burnout and physical health, including physiological risk factors and physical disease states, have hardly been explored. The literature on burnout and well being or mental health is substantial, but has not been reviewed with sufficient attention to the instruments used to gauge burnout and their respective construct validity. The objectives of this chapter are to review current knowledge on the above issues and to provide a perspective on future directions of research into burnout – health linkages. We start out by discussing the conceptual meaning of burnout. Burnout is viewed as an affective reaction to ongoing stress. We contend that core content of this affective reaction is the gradual depletion over time of individuals' intrinsic energetic resources, leading to feelings of emotional exhaustion, physical fatigue, and cognitive weariness (Shirom, 1989). Given the multidimensionality of the construct and the controversy over its operational definition (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001), this conceptual analysis is essential for understanding the possible health consequences of burnout. We seek in this chapter to propose mechanisms that link burnout and health (cf. Schaufeli & Greenglass, 2001). The following sections cover the empirical literature on burnout's linkages with mental and physical health, respectively. Typically, empirical studies on the health consequences of burnout are based on a cross-sectional study design and measure burnout, and also mental health, by asking respondents to complete a self-report questionnaire. In this review, the emphasis is on longitudinal studies on burnout's impact on health since they provide more credence to cause and effect statements. The voluminous empirical research on burnout has already been reviewed by several by meta-Inventory (MBI). In references made to this body of studies, we will focus on results reported for the emotional exhaustion scale. This review covers burnout of employees in work organizations, excluding research that deals exclusively with non-employment settings (e.g., athletes' burnout: Dale & Weinberg, 1990). Also excluded is research that deals with burnout in life domains other than work, like crossover of burnout …