Prevention of burnout: New perspectives

Job burnout has long been recognized as a problem that leaves once-enthusiastic professionals feeling drained, cynical, and ineffective. This article proposes two new approaches to the prevention of burnout that focus on the interaction between personal and situational factors. The first approach, based on the Maslach multidimensional model, focuses on the exact opposite of burnout: increasing engagement with work by creating a better “fit” between the individual and the job. The second approach draws from the decision-making literature and reframes burnout in terms of how perceptions of the risk of burnout may lead to suboptimal choices that actually increase the likelihood of burning out. These new approaches provide a more direct strategy for preventing burnout than typical unidimensional “stress” models because these new approaches (1) specify criteria for evaluating outcomes and (2) focus attention on the relationship between the person and the situation rather than one or the other in isolation.