Personality Antecedents of Burnout among Middle-Aged Physicians

Abstract

Utilizing a prospective design, this study addressed the question of whether vulnerability to burnout among physicians is associated with certain longstanding, maladaptive personality tendencies that predate entrance into medical training and subsequent exposure to the intrinsic stresses of medical practice. Subjects were 440 practicing physicians whose personality traits and psychological adjustment had been assessed with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) shortly before entering medical school who were followed up by mail questionnaire an average of 25 years later to evaluate current symptoms of burnout with the Tedium scale. Results revealed that higher burnout scores were significantly correlated with a number of standard and special MMPI scales measuring low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, dysphoria and obsessive worry, passivity, social anxiety, and withdrawal from others. In contrast, burnout scores exhibited no significant associations with demographic or practice characteristics, including sex, age, medical specialty, practice arrangement, hours worked per week, or percentage of work time spent in direct contact with patients. Alternative interpretations of these findings and their potential implications for reducing the risk of burnout among physicians are discussed.

The Well-Being and Personal Wellness Promotion Strategies of Medical Oncologists in the North Central Cancer Treatment Group

“…The study is also limited by its cross-sectional design and cannot determine causality between use of specific wellness strategies and high well-being. A number of factors, including personality [65,66,67], affect the experience of QOL and may account for some of the differences observed. Future longitudinal studies are needed to evaluate a causal relationship between physician well-being and use of specific wellness promotion strategies.…”

On the Discriminant Validity of Burnout, Depression and Anxiety: A Re-examination of the Burnout Measure

“…The BM has been applied to a wide variety of managerial and professional occupations in several countries including Israel (Pines et al, 1981). Moreover, it is being used in current research (e.g., McCranie and Brandsma, 1988;Pines and Guendelman, 1995;Cropanzano et al, 1997;Ito et al, 1999;Weisberg and Sagie, 1999). Is burnout, as operationalized by the BM, a one-dimensional affective state, in the sense of conceptualizing a single attribute (Lumsden, 1961), distinct from the affective states of anxiety and depression?…”

Feelings of Professional Fulfilment and Exhaustion in Mental Health Personnel: The Importance of Organisational and Individual Factors

“…Previous studies of health care workers have shown a significant negative relationship of burnout with self-esteem and active coping [27, 28]and with hardiness [29], a factor which has been found to be associated with self-esteem [30]. In fact, a logistic regression in the present study showed that, in addition to low feelings of professional fulfilment and high work load, low self-esteem, being a woman and low use of active coping were all risk factors for being in the top quartile of work-related exhaustion.…”