an article by Stefan Diestel and Klaus-Helmut Schmidt (Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors at the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany) and Marlen Cosmar (Institute for Work and Health of the German Social Accident Insurance, Dresden, Germany) published in Work & Stress: An International Journal of Work, Health & Organisations Volume 27 Issue 2 (2013)
Abstract
Burnout patients often report deficits in cognitive control, and there is a need to understand the processes involved.
Drawing on recent findings, we hypothesised that emotional exhaustion and task-related demands on executive control would interact in predicting performance in tasks requiring the updating and monitoring of working memory as well as the inhibition of prepotent (dominant or automatic) responses. In accordance with recent conceptualisations of burnout, we focused on emotional exhaustion as the core symptom of burnout.
The sample comprised 81 employees recruited from nursing homes for elderly care in Germany, who participated in a laboratory study involving cognitive tasks. Based on a median split, participants were divided into two groups: those with high burnout and those with low burnout.
In line with our hypotheses, the high exhaustion participants performed less well than those with low exhaustion only when tasks put high demands on their executive control. As predicted, high levels of emotional exhaustion were associated with more errors and longer reaction times when demands on executive control were high, whereas no performance differences were found when both tasks put low demands on executive control.
The implications for practice are discussed.
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