Seminar by Prof. Carina Lomberg, Technical University of Denmark
Event details
| Date | 01.04.2019 |
| Hour | 12:00 › 13:30 |
| Speaker | Prof. Carina Lomberg, Technical University of Denmark |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
"The Burnout Epidemic—How Burnout Spreads Across Organizations"
Abstract
We introduce a new way of seeing burnout as a phenomenon being much more pervasive, devastating, and enduring than previously thought. Building upon knowledge from medical science—specifically, infectious disease epidemiology—we theorize burnout as an infectious, epidemic disease that is able to spread not only within, but also across the boundaries of organizations. We suggest a framework for assessing the patterns of burnout transmission, with employee mobility serving as the driver of disease contagion across organizations. We empirically test the proposed burnout transmission patterns by observing more than 250,000 employees and more than 17,000 Danish firms over a time period of 12 years. Our findings reveal that newly hired burned-out employees as well as employees leaving burned-out organizations (with a high prevalence of burnout in their workforces) serve as carriers of the burnout disease. More strikingly, once burnout is “implanted” into the hiring organization, our results indicate that the spreading of burnout is so extensive that it reaches the magnitude of an epidemic. We advance theory in the field of burnout by integrating knowledge from infectious disease epidemiology, which helps to see burnout and burnout contagion in a novel way.
Abstract
We introduce a new way of seeing burnout as a phenomenon being much more pervasive, devastating, and enduring than previously thought. Building upon knowledge from medical science—specifically, infectious disease epidemiology—we theorize burnout as an infectious, epidemic disease that is able to spread not only within, but also across the boundaries of organizations. We suggest a framework for assessing the patterns of burnout transmission, with employee mobility serving as the driver of disease contagion across organizations. We empirically test the proposed burnout transmission patterns by observing more than 250,000 employees and more than 17,000 Danish firms over a time period of 12 years. Our findings reveal that newly hired burned-out employees as well as employees leaving burned-out organizations (with a high prevalence of burnout in their workforces) serve as carriers of the burnout disease. More strikingly, once burnout is “implanted” into the hiring organization, our results indicate that the spreading of burnout is so extensive that it reaches the magnitude of an epidemic. We advance theory in the field of burnout by integrating knowledge from infectious disease epidemiology, which helps to see burnout and burnout contagion in a novel way.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
Contact
- cdm-seminars@epfl.ch