Troubles on troubled minds: an intensive longitudinal diary study on the role of burnout in the resilience process following acute stressor exposure

Abstract

ABSTRACT Burnout negatively affects employees’ health, life satisfaction, and performance. However, little is known about how burnout shapes employees’ resilience process in daily life to produce these adverse effects. Therefore, we present a 30-day diary study among an international sample of 410 employees, studying burnout-related differences in response to an acute stressor (i.e., learning about the COVID-19 diagnosis of a close friend or family member). Specifically, we investigate how this event affects COVID-19-related worrying, positive and negative affect, and work engagement, both on the day itself and across several post-event days. Multilevel analyses with cross-level interactions between individual-level burnout and day-level stressor occurrence reveal that employees high in burnout score significantly higher on negative affect and lower on positive affect and work engagement on the day the stressor occurred. Additionally, discontinuous random coefficient growth modelling with burnout-time interactions shows that employees high in burnout sustain higher levels of COVID-19 worrying, but their negative and positive affect return to pre-event levels in the post-event days. These findings shed important new light on how burnout affects employees’ resilience process in response to acute stressors, thereby potentially identifying a key proximal mechanism by which burnout’s negative distal effects on health, well-being, and performance emerge.