Christina Maslach: The pioneer behind burnout research

Christina Maslach, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, transformed burnout into a national conversation. Before she began her research on burnout in the 1970s, the phrase was batted around informally, but it was Maslach who formally defined it, identified risk factors, and developed the most widely used tool for measuring burnout.

It’s thanks to Maslach that "burnout," which she defines as "a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job," became part of the mainstream lexicon. She has published hundreds of articles in both academic journals and general-audience magazines. Her most recent book, The Burnout Challenge (written alongside colleague Michael P. Leiter), was listed by Publisher’s Weekly as a top-ten book in business and economics. And in 2019, based on Maslach’s research, the World Health Organization officially listed burnout in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision.

Maslach, who is also a core researcher at the University of California, Berkeley’s Healthy Workplaces Center, has received the 2017 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award, the 2020 National Academy of Science’s award for Scientific Reviewing, and multiple Lifetime Achievement Awards. In 2021, Business Insider named her one of the top 100 people transforming business.

"It’s a term that just resonates with people," Maslach says. "It describes what happens when you used to have passion, used to be on fire, and then it’s gone. The stress of the work eats you alive, burns you up."

When Maslach first began her academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, she had never heard the term burnout. Fresh out of her doctoral program at Stanford University, where she studied how people cope with strong emotions, she turned her focus on to workers in emotionally demanding jobs: first responders, nurses, prison guards, and police.

As Maslach conducted her research, she began noticing a pattern. Again and again, participants asked to share, in confidence, troubling experiences: "They would tell me things about their job, things they weren’t particularly proud of," Maslach says. "Treating people more as objects than as human beings, doing less than their very best, cutting corners, beginning to feel that something had changed within themselves."

Initially, Maslach struggled to find the right term for this phenomenon. Then, at a dinner party, a lawyer suggested the term burnout. When Maslach tested it with interviewees, their response was immediate. "They’d say ‘yes, that’s it!’" Maslach says. "It was such a strong reaction."

The first time Maslach published her findings, they didn’t appear in an academic journal; instead, she published them in a cover story for the now-defunct magazine Human Behavior. She described passionate workers who had become exhausted and cynical, whose work quality declined as they grew detached from the people they served. The response was overwhelming. "In today’s terms, the article went viral," Maslach says. "I was getting stacks of letters and phone calls coming in saying, ‘Oh, my God, I thought I was the only one.’" That was when Maslach knew that she had stumbled upon something important.

Today, the term burnout is ubiquitous. During the covid-19 pandemic, health care workers used the word to describe the total depletion they felt caring for critically ill patients. Desk workers and parents invoked it to describe the fatigue they felt working from home on computers 24/7, or keeping homebound kids occupied. In response to a 2023 Gallup Poll, three out of four workers reported that they felt burned out "very often" or "always."

"Burnout is a term that’s immediate, that’s visceral. People relate to it," Maslach says. "The problem is, people run with it and use it to mean all kinds of things: they use it to mean I’m bored, or I haven’t had a good idea all week."

Burnout, however, is more than fatigue or boredom. From those early interviews with workers, Maslach identified three dimensions: exhaustion, depersonalization—a negative, cynical, or detached response to other people—and reduced personal accomplishment, a perceived or actual decline in competence and productivity. Based on those criteria, Maslach developed a way to quantitatively measure burnout: a test called the Maslach Burnout Inventory. She has found that many people score highly in one or two dimensions of burnout, making them "disengaged," but that true burnout—high scores in all three—is less common than polls suggest.

Another widely misunderstood aspect of burnout: it’s an organizational issue, not a personal one, Maslach says. Time off and self-care don’t fix it. "Burnout isn’t a medical condition. It’s a response to chronic job stressors that have not been successfully managed in the workplace," Maslach says.

Maslach likes to use the analogy of a canary in the coalmine. If a bird stopped singing or collapsed, it wasn’t because the bird wasn’t resilient enough, Maslach says. "It’s a sign that something is wrong in the mine." Likewise, burnout isn’t proof that workers can’t handle their jobs. "My sense is that when people begin to change the way they’re working from doing their very best to doing the bare minimum, it’s a sign that something is beginning to go wrong in the workplace," Maslach says.

Maslach has pinpointed six areas of work life that play a role in the development of burnout: work overload, lack of control, insufficient rewards, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and value conflicts. Sometimes, the root cause isn’t obvious. In one case study included in The Burnout Challenge, the CEO of a company assumed that high workload and low pay were to blame for widespread employee burnout. However, when Maslach and her colleagues conducted surveys with the workers themselves, they found that lack of fairness was the greatest contributor. Each year, the company offered a Distinguished Service Award—and employees hated it. They felt that it went to the wrong people. In response, the company set up a team to redesign the reward process and create a fair way to recognize employees who had truly done something special.

A year later, when Maslach resurveyed employees, they reported greater fairness—and, as a result, higher engagement. The case study demonstrates how Maslach’s research can inform organizational change—and how that, in turn, can meaningfully reduce burnout.

"There’s an optimism that it doesn’t have to be this way," Maslach says.