Burnout and work engagement: Independent factors or opposite poles?

Vicente González-Romá a , Wilmar B. Schaufeli b, Arnold B. Bakker b and Susana Lloret a

a University of Valencia, Department of Methodology of Behavioral Sciences, Av. Blasco Ibanez, 21, 46010-Valencia, Spain

b Utrecht University, Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, The Netherlands

Abstract

Burnout researchers have proposed that the conceptual opposites of emotional exhaustion and cynicism (the core dimensions of burnout) are vigor and dedication (the core dimensions of engagement), respectively ( Maslach and Leiter, 1997 and Schaufeli et al., 2002 ). We tested this proposition by ascertaining whether two sets of items, exhaustion–vigor and cynicism–dedication, were scalable on two distinct underlying bipolar dimensions (i.e., energy and identification, respectively). The results obtained by means of the non-parametric Mokken scaling method in three different samples ( N s = 477, 507, and 381) supported our proposal: the core burnout and engagement dimensions can be seen as opposites of each other along two distinct bipolar dimensions dubbed energy and identification.

Keywords: Job burnout; Work engagement; Bipolar dimensions; Mokken Scaling

• Lista de los Top 25 Hottest articles
• Abstract del artículo (pdf)
• Descarga del artículo