Abstract
The study examined the factor structure of burnout, as measured with the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory. The participants were 235 employees of a public administration agency who assessed their burnout online for 10 consecutive working days. Two models were tested with multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, assuming the same one or two-factor structure at the within- and between-person levels. Both models showed a reasonable fit to the data, but due to a strong correlation between exhaustion and disengagement and low within-person reliability for disengagement, a unidimensional model seems more valid. A cross-level invariance was not confirmed for either of the structures, showing that factor loadings for the same items differ significantly between the levels. This suggests that burnout is not the same latent variable at each level; rather, there are factors other than daily burnout that influence person-level scores and ignoring these across-level discrepancies may lead to biased conclusions.
Highlights
Job burnout, which refers to job stress that has not been properly managed, is a wide-spread phenomenon associated with the contemporary work
The intra-class correlation (ICC) coefficients suggest that a significant proportion of variance in each variable is due to differences between persons
The goodness of fit indices are comparable to the ones obtained for the two-factor model, with only slightly higher values for Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) and sizeAdjusted BIC (SABIC)
Summary
Job burnout, which refers to job stress that has not been properly managed, is a wide-spread phenomenon associated with the contemporary work. The World Health Organization [1] included burnout in the latest version of the International Classification of Disease (ICD-11), illustrating the global importance of this “occupational phenomenon”. Experiencing burnout is tightly related to work; its consequences may spill over to other psychological and social aspects of life. Burnout seems to be a more serious problem among human service professionals than other professionals [3,4,5,6], it can be observed in any profession. A more precise identification of the burnout phenomenon among employees, from early signs to clinical symptoms, is important for the welfare of society as a whole
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