Personality, burnout, and turnover intention –a case for work life adaptation

Tailoring work environmental initiatives to individual differences could contribute to reduced burnout and turnover intention thus increasing workplace retention and employee well-being.

Background:  Many professions requiring higher education, typically three-year college degrees, face challenges with retention and attrition, particularly in emotionally demanding fields like nursing, child welfare education, social work, and teaching. While employment strategies often emphasize work environment interventions as crucial, recognizing individual differences in personal characteristics can also play a significant role in preventing or managing burnout and turnover. Research indicates that the Big Five personality traits (Extroversion, Agreeableness, Openness to experience, Conscientiousness and Emotional stability) are linked to productivity and well-being. From a public health perspective, it is important to consider if differences in personality may affect other job-related outcomes such as burnout and turnover intention. Employees differ in their personality traits, and these differences ought to be acknowledged to optimize the capabilities of each individual employee to improve well-being.
Aim: To identify personality characteristics that are associated with the work-related states Burnout and Turnover intention and creating a parsimonious model of personality and work-related states.
Methods: Meta-analytic systematic literature study of associations between the Big Five personality traits (Extroversion, Agreeableness, Openness to experience, Conscientiousness and Emotional stability) and the work-related states Burnout and Turnover intention for employees with a three-year college education. Bivariate correlations between the variables of interest were collected from a total of 27 research articles (N=10753 employees) and analysed with meta-analytic structural equation modelling (MetaSEM).
Findings:  MetaSEM analyses indicated that Extroversion, Agreeableness and Openness to experience did not have any significant associations with Burnout, and none of the Big Five traits had significant associations with Turnover intention. The most parsimonious model was found to be a mediated regression model where Conscientiousness (B=-0.12, 95% CI [-0.22, -0.03]) and Emotional stability (B=-0.45, 95% CI [-0.56, -0.34]) were associated with Burnout, and Burnout then was associated with Turnover intentions (B=0.46, 95% CI [0.40, 0.53]). The model had good fit to the data (Chi (df=2) =0.96, p=0.62).
Conclusion: The personality traits Conscientiousness and Emotional stability are directly associated with Burnout and indirectly associated with Turnover intention for employees with a typical three-year college degree. Some employees are thus more vulnerable to burnout and turnover, and the workplace should take this into consideration in workplace health promotion initiatives.