Abstract
Proactive burnout prevention refers to a set of proactive behaviors employees may engage in to prevent burnout. Findings of a previous exploratory qualitative study indicated that employees who had to deal with high demands engaged in specific proactive behaviors in the work, home, and personal domain in order to prevent burnout. To further examine proactive burnout prevention in longitudinal quantitative research and to be able to investigate its effectiveness, an inventory for assessing these kinds of behaviors is necessary. The goal of this study was twofold: 1) to develop an inventory to assess employees’ proactive burnout prevention behaviors and examine its factorial validity, 2) to explore the broader nomological network of proactive burnout prevention behaviors by examining its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. A two-wave longitudinal survey (T1: N = 343; T2: N = 201) was conducted. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that proactive burnout prevention can be reliably assessed with 40 items that load on 12 factors, indicating 12 separate proactive burnout prevention behaviors. Moreover, exploration of the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the proactive burnout prevention inventory showed promising results, as expected relationships were confirmed for most behaviors. Further research is needed to substantiate the findings and examine the effectiveness of proactive burnout prevention.
Highlights
Ample research has established that employees who are confronted with high job demands together with low job resources are at risk of burnout (e.g., [1,2])
Various proactive concepts, such as feedback-seeking behavior and individual innovation, have been studied, and have been found to be positively related to organizational outcomes, such as job performance and organizational effectiveness (e.g., [12,13]). Proactive behaviors, such as voice [14] and job crafting [15], have been linked to reduced levels of burnout [16,17]. These findings indicate that proactive behaviors can be effective in the prevention of burnout
Discriminant validity was almost completely supported, since eleven of the 12 proactive burnout prevention behaviors showed no significant relationship with generalized compliance (p > 0.05), Reducing hindering job demands was the only proactive burnout prevention behavior that showed a significant relationship with generalized compliance (r = −0.15, p < 0.01)
Summary
Ample research has established that employees who are confronted with high job demands together with low job resources are at risk of burnout (e.g., [1,2]). These studies often suggest practical recommendations informing organizations which actions they can take to prevent or reduce burnout risks. The actions that employees themselves can take have received less research attention [3]. This is remarkable, since burnout develops in an interchange between employees and their work environment [2,4], indicating that both the employer and the employee can intervene to prevent burnout. As Demerouti [3] stated, more research is needed to uncover the possible actions employees may undertake in an attempt to avoid burnout
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