Personality Traits Correlation with Professional Burnout of Employees from the Advertising Industry

Abstract

Abstract Research Purpose. The aim of the research is to study and clarify the level of professional burnout, personality traits, their interrelationships, and the impact of personality traits on professional burnout in the advertising industry to make recommendations to advertising company managers. Methodology. The method of quantitative data collection was a 128-item questionnaire, a combination of the Latvian Personality Survey (LPA-v3) (Perepjolkina & Reņģe, 2013); the Maslach Professional Burnout Survey (Maslach & Jackson, 1981) adapted version in Latvian (Vaine, 2019). Data: N=148 respondents, data collected electronically via Google Forms, ensuring respondent confidentiality. Findings. Advertising employees have high emotional exhaustion, moderate levels of depersonalization or cynicism, and high levels of personal achievement reduction. The highest indicators of general personality traits are as follows: openness to experience, conscientiousness, and honesty - humility, while lower indicators are for extroversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness. Emotional exhaustion has a strong positive correlation with neuroticism and a negative correlation with extroversion; depersonalization has a positive correlation with neuroticism, a positive correlation with agreeableness and a negative correlation with extroversion. Decreased achievement or work efficiency has a strong negative correlation with neuroticism, a strong positive correlation with extroversion, and a positive correlation with openness to experience. Burnout dimensions also have very close positive and negative correlations with the sub-traits. There are statistically significant regression models between professional burnout scales and sub-traits: depressiveness and sociability have the greatest impact on emotional exhaustion; the greatest impact on depersonalisation is for depressiveness; joyfulness; friendliness; the greatest impact on changes in performance is for stress intolerance; joyfulness; creativity. Practical implications. With at least 50% of advertising employees experiencing high levels of burnout, it is recommended to organise individual and Team Supervision sessions to prevent burnout and identify the triggering factors in a specific organization. This format ensures that both employees and managers are equally accountable for the outcome and through a focused process promotes overall employee engagement, problem-solving, conflict resolution, understanding of diversity, empathy, and role clarity. No less important, the knowledge of the most common personal traits of Advertising Industries employees will help company managers to make more informed hiring decisions.