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E-mail communication patterns and job burnout
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, PLoS ONE, Vol 13, Iss 3, p e0193966 (2018)
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science, 2018.
-
Abstract
- A considerable body of research has documented the negative effects of job burnout on employees and their organizations, emphasizing the importance of the identification of early signs of the phenomenon for the purposes of prevention and intervention. However, such timely identification is difficult due to the time and cost of assessing the burnout levels of all employees in an organization using established scales. In this paper, we propose an innovative way to identify employees at risk of job burnout by analyzing their e-mail communication patterns. Building on the Job Demands–Resources model, we theorize about the relationship between e-mail communication patterns and levels of employee exhaustion and disengagement (two dimensions of burnout). We analyzed 52,190 e-mails exchanged between 57 employees of a medium sized R&D company over a five-month period. We then related these employees’ communication patterns to their levels of burnout, collected using an established scale (the OLBI–Oldenburg Burnout Inventory). Our results provide support for the overall proposition of the paper, that e-mail communications can be used to identify individuals at risk of job burnout. Our models explain up to 34% of the variance of burnout and up to 37% and 19% respectively of the variance of exhaustion and disengagement. They also successfully distinguish between employees with a higher risk of burnout and those with lower levels of risk (F1 score of 84% with recall of 100% and 73% precision). We discuss the implications of our results and present suggestions for future research.
- Subjects :
- Male
Economics
Applied psychology
Emotions
lcsh:Medicine
Social Sciences
050109 social psychology
Burnout
Surveys
Electronic mail
Mathematical and Statistical Techniques
Sociology
Surveys and Questionnaires
Medicine and Health Sciences
Psychology
Disengagement theory
lcsh:Science
Burnout, Professional
Fatigue
Multidisciplinary
Electronic Mail
Communication
05 social sciences
Social Communication
Variance (accounting)
Research Personnel
Italy
Research Design
Scale (social sciences)
Area Under Curve
Physical Sciences
Regression Analysis
Female
Risk assessment
Statistics (Mathematics)
Research Article
Employment
Adult
Psychological Stress
Jobs
Linear Regression Analysis
Research and Analysis Methods
Risk Assessment
Intervention (counseling)
0502 economics and business
Mental Health and Psychiatry
Humans
0501 psychology and cognitive sciences
Statistical Methods
Social Behavior
Survey Research
Work engagement
lcsh:R
Biology and Life Sciences
Models, Theoretical
Work Engagement
Communications
Early Diagnosis
Labor Economics
Linear Models
lcsh:Q
050203 business & management
Mathematics
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 13
- Issue :
- 3
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....0186ab3374d63e9ad84df8c6aca0bf07