ABSTRACT
Burnout, which involves a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal job conditions, has been an important social issue for many years. The interpersonal context of job meant that, from the beginning, burnout was studied not simply as an individual stress response, but in terms of an individual's relational transactions in workplace. The use of 'burnout' was reported by a clinical psychologist, Herbert Freudenberger, in a volume of articles about free clinics. At that same time, a social psychologist, Christina Maslach, was conducting exploratory research with workers in healthcare and human service occupations, studying how they coped with strong emotional arousal on the job. Christina Maslach and Jackson took on that psychometric challenge and developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), which was first published over thirty years ago, and continues to be the leading measure to assess burnout in research around the world. Addition to relatively few research studies on burnout interventions, those that have been done are often limited or flawed.
