Do Employees with Burnout Prefer Low-Effort Performance Strategies?

Abstract

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS Employees with burnout experience a persistent, negative work-related state of mind primarily characterized by exhaustion, decreased motivation, and a sense of reduced effectiveness. Although most employees with burnout (67%) were found to apply an efficient high-effort strategy like healthy controls, significantly more employees with burnout (33%) than healthy controls (8%) applied a low-effort strategy. However, the low-effort strategy used by a significant number of burnout employees does not seem to be an adaptive way of coping with fatigue but was rather the result of a structurally reduced motivation to expend effort and/or cognitive impairments. The majority of burnout employees appeared capable of performing tasks adequately and applying high-effort strategies, but they experience substantial distress during task performance. Employers may consider temporarily providing these employees with less-demanding tasks, as a reduction in stress may enable a normalization of relevant biological processes. A small group of employees with burnout did not appear to be able to adequately perform complex as well as simple tasks, and offering such employees a cognitive behavioral treatment program for burnout may be of merit. TECHNICAL ABSTRACT Background: Several studies have shown that fatigued individuals may adapt their task performance strategically. It is not known, though, whether such an adaptation is also applied by employees with burnout who suffer from long-term fatigue. Strategic adjustments can be achieved by applying simpler response strategies with lesser demands on working memory. Should employees with burnout employ these strategic adaptations to task performance, it would explain why burnout is accompanied by compromised executive functioning and not difficulties with more automatic cognitive processes. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether reduced cognitive performance in burnout could be explained by fatigue-related strategic adaptations of task performance. Methods: Forty employees with burnout and 40 healthy controls were presented with a task they could execute either by adopting an effective but high-effort strategy or by applying a less effective low-effort strategy. Results: Significantly more employees with burnout than healthy controls applied a low-effort strategy, even though the majority used a high-effort strategy. The employees with burnout that applied a low-effort strategy failed to maintain their performance level and reported high levels of fatigue, aversion, and effort. Conclusions: Employees with burnout do not appear to adjust their performance strategically as fatigued healthy employees do. Most employees with burnout applied a high-effort performance strategy despite high levels of distress, just like non-fatigued healthy controls. A minority of the employees with burnout applied a low-effort strategy and actually did not seem to try to perform even the simple tasks. Their inferior performance seems to be the result of a structural reduced motivation to spend effort and/or cognitive impairments.