Job burnout of the information technology worker: Work exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment

Abstract

The unique environment of the information technology (IT) worker is prone to create work exhaustion, a conceptual component of job burnout. Prior research on the IT worker focuses primarily on the antecedent conditions to work exhaustion, uniquely identifying the IT work environment including emotional dissonance, perceived workload, role ambiguity and conflict, autonomy, and fairness of rewards. However, though work exhaustion is a critical product of conditions in the IT work environment, two ignored dimensions of job burnout theory, depersonalization and lessened feelings of personal accomplishment, create a more complete picture and extend current models of IT worker burnout. The extended model with established antecedents is empirically tested through survey techniques and found to hold. Management needs to be aware of these additional symptoms of burnout to circumvent undesirable consequences.