The Burnout Warning

Abstract

This chapter covers three distinct themes that encompass the concept of burnout warning: inherent adversities in the modality shift, fear and ambiguity in higher education, and attempting to work in suboptimal conditions. While thriving represents a concept that denotes success and achievement, burnout represents exhaustion and fatigue. The behavior exhibited by staff and its correlation to burnout is best explained by the works of Maslach and Leiter using the areas of worklife (AW) model entailing organizational risk factors. The AW model explains how burnout is expedited when there is a disruption to balance in the following areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. The findings indicate that staff members at the University of Utah displayed early signs of burnout warning. The factors that contribute to early signals of burnout include resource shortages, an increase in overall workload-including persistent emotional labor-and a lack of acknowledgement. The chapter illustrates how stressors, aggravated by COVID fatigue, fostered an environment that mobilized the onset of burnout. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)