Abstract
The personality trait need for cognition (NFC) refers to individual differences in the tendency to engage in and enjoy cognitive endeavors. In today’s working world, which is characterized by increasing cognitive demands, NFC may contribute to resilience against work-related stress and burnout symptoms. We investigated this question in a large population-wide sample of 4,134 individuals (Study 1) and in a sample of 125 students (Study 2). NFC was consistently negatively related to the burnout facets emotional exhaustion and reduced personal efficacy of the Maslach burnout inventory and explained up to 10% additional variance in burnout symptoms over and above the five-factor model of personality. In the student sample, where stress factors are mainly cognitive in nature, NFC was the most relevant predictor. In this sample, we additionally investigated whether NFC might be a relevant moderator of the inconsistently found associations between burnout and impairments in cognitive functioning. The participants conducted three cognitive tasks (number–letter task, two-back task, and Go/NoGo task) that measure the executive functions switching, updating, and response inhibition, respectively. While burnout was slightly negatively related to working memory performance, NFC did not moderate the relationship between burnout and executive control which could be traced back to the young and healthy sample used to examine this research question. All in all, our results clearly suggest that NFC may be an important individual difference factor contributing to the resilience against burnout, especially if stress factors are cognitive in nature.
Highlights
Work-related chronic stress is a major health challenge in Western societies
We examined whether need for cognition (NFC) is negatively associated with burnout symptoms as measured with the widely used Maslach burnout inventory (MBI) and whether the correlations may change when controlling for variance of the personality factors of the Five-factor model (FFM) that were found to be related to burnout dimensions (Alarcon et al, 2009; Swider and Zimmerman, 2010) and that share some variance with NFC (e.g., Fleischhauer et al, 2010)
Based on a population wide sample of 4.134 individuals, we examined the association of NFC and FFM with the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) facets emotional exhaustion (EE), CY, and reduced Personal Efficacy (rPE)
Summary
Work-related chronic stress is a major health challenge in Western societies. Within the German Health Interview and Examination Survey for Adults (DEGS1) conducted between 2008 and 2011, 11% of the 5.850 participants between 18 and 64 years reported high levels of chronic stress. About a quarter century later, the definition of burnout-causing working environments is broaden, so that any kind of work is potentially considered to bear a risk of burning out (Schaufeli and Taris, 2005), with an estimated prevalence of 13% (Norlund et al, 2010) to 26% (Adriaenssens et al, 2015) in the general working population of Western countries and with an increasing trend at least for some professions (Shanafelt et al, 2015)
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