Reciprocal Associations between Burnout and Depression: An 8-Year Longitudinal Study

The purpose of the present four-wave longitudinal study was to examine the differentiation and reciprocal associations between burnout and depression, and their associations with a series of correlates related to employees’ physical and psychological health (sleep disturbances, somatic symptoms, self-rated subjective health, and life satisfaction). A total of 542 early career Finnish workers filled out questionnaires four times over a period of 8 years. First, our results supported the superiority of a bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling (bifactor-ESEM) representation of employees’ burnout ratings, and the empirical differentiation between burnout and depression ratings over each measurement occasion. These results further revealed moderate cross-sectional associations between burnout and depression, supporting their inter-related character but also their empirical distinctiveness. Second, autoregressive cross-lagged analyses revealed that both constructs presented a moderate level of stability over time and reciprocal associations that generalized to all time intervals considered. Finally, relations between depression and all correlates measures during the last wave of the study were in the expected direction, whereas burnout was found to be more weakly related to only a subset of these correlates. Taken together, these results thus support the distinctiveness of burnout and depression, and the presence of mutually reinforcing relations between them.