Association of adaptive and maladaptive narcissism with personal burnout: findings from a cross-sectional study

Abstract

Burnout is associated with poor mental and physical functioning and high costs for societies. Personality attributes may critically increase the risk of personal burnout. We specifically examined whether narcissism associates with personal burnout in a working population. We studied n=1,461 employees (mean age 41.3 ± 9.4 yr, 52% men) drawn from a random sample of a pharmaceutical company in Germany. All participants completed the personal burnout subscale of the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and the Narcissistic Personality Inventory to assess maladaptive (entitlement/exploitativeness) and adaptive (leadership/authority) narcissism. In linear regression analysis, when mutually adjusting for the maladaptive and adaptive narcissism scales, higher adaptive narcissism was associated with lower burnout scores (ß=−0.04, p<0.05), whereas higher maladaptive narcissism was associated with higher burnout scores (ß=0.04, p<0.05). Additionally, younger age (ß=−0.07), female gender (ß=0.11), depressive symptoms (ß=0.42), sleep problems (ß=0.30), stress at work (ß=0.23) and at home (ß=0.09) were all independently associated with increased burnout scores (all p-values<0.01). Narcissistic personality attributes may play an important role in personal burnout. While maladaptive narcissism was associated with increased levels of burnout symptoms, adaptive narcissism was associated with fewer burnout symptoms.

Five-Factor Model Best Describes Narcissistic Personality Inventory Across Different Item Response Formats

“…On the other hand, Leadership seems to capture more adaptive aspects of narcissism, showing stronger positive relations with Extraversion. This is in line with the theoretical assumption that Exploitativeness (or Manipulativeness in NPI five-factor model) and Entitlement represent the maladaptive content of narcissism, and leadership represents the adaptive content of narcissism (Emmons, 1987;Pincus et al, 2009;Von Ka¨nel, Herr, Van Vianen, & Schmidt, 2017;Watson, Grisham, Trotter, & Biderman, 1984). Therefore, Leadership was more closely related to positive affect, social confidence, and dominance, which are indicators of positive outcomes, e.g., well-being.…”

Knowledge sharing among academics: why organizational narcissism in higher education matters?

“…Future studies could hence focus on replicating our study in the world's top universities and on analysing the moderating effects of academics' stress, burnout and a high degree of pressure to publish in high-impact journals on the relationship between organizational narcissism and knowledge sharing. The analysis would confirm whether that relationship is strengthened by those variables, especially because according to the business literature, narcissism is an inhibitor of work stress (Maynard et al, 2015) and is associated with a lower degree of burnout and a greater capacity to work under pressure (Von Känel et al, 2017); conversely, it could confirm if that relationship is somehow weakened by these variables. In this way, conclusive evidence regarding the positive effects of organizational narcissism would be provided and the call to consider the incidence of various kinds of pressures on scholarly work would be answered (Quarchioni et al, 2020).…”

Thinking Against Burnout? An Individual’s Tendency to Engage in and Enjoy Thinking as a Potential Resilience Factor of Burnout Symptoms and Burnout-Related Impairment in Executive Functioning

“…Additionally, although to a lesser extent, other personality factors have been studied in their relation to burnout: Positive associations were found with (maladaptive) narcissism (e.g., von Känel et al, 2017 ) and negative affectivity, whereas self-esteem, self-efficacy, internal locus of control, positive affectivity, optimism, proactive personality, and hardiness depicted small to moderate negative associations with burnout ( Alarcon et al, 2009 ).…”