Psychological burnout is a complex phenomenon, and research on this construct has reflected its complexity. The term used to describe the research field, burnout, is the label for an extreme end state that shares many features with the clinical syndrome of depression. This chapter expresses that the viability of burnout as a research area depends on a thorough understanding of the full range of experiences assessed in burnout studies. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) focused on providing an accurate description of career crises experienced by human service workers. The chapter focuses on two concerns regarding the definition of burnout. First, is burnout a unitary construct and can people be categorized as more or less burned out on a linear scale, or is burnout a more complex syndrome. Second, to what extent is temporal development intrinsic to the concept of burnout and are there systematic causal relationships among the components of burnout as measured by the MBI.
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