It is now clear that the Covid-19 pandemic has aggravated burnout and related forms of workplace distress, across many industries. This has led more organizations to become more aware of burnout, and more concerned about what to do about it. We felt it was the right time to assess the use of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) in organizations. This article will give an overview about what the MBI is, cover some concerning ways that it is being misused, and show how employers should use it for the benefit of employees, organizations, and the world’s understanding of burnout.

What Is the MBI?

As the pandemic has spilled from 2020 into 2021, so many people in so many places are talking about burnout. The phenomenon of burnout is not new — people who have been worn out and turned off by the work they do have appeared in both fictional and nonfictional writing for centuries. In the past 60 years, the term “burnout” has become a popular way of describing this particular phenomenon that captures what many people are experiencing now.

Abbreviated Maslach Burnout Inventory STEP 1: Complete the Abbreviated Maslach Inventory For each statement, mark the box that most accurately reflects your response:!! Every day A few times a week Once a week A few times a month Once a month or less A few times a year Never I deal very effectively with the.

Access the Maslach Burnout Inventory Purpose To measure burnout in individuals who work with people (human services professions). Format/Data Source Maslach Burnout Inventory – Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) is a 22-item survey that covers 3 areas: Emotional exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Low sense of personal accomplishment (PA).
The first burnout measure that was based on a comprehensive program of psychometric research was the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI)2, 3. The MBI was specifically designed to assess the three dimensions of the burnout experience which had emerged from the earlier qualitative research.
Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) has been recognized for more than a decade as the leading measure of burnout, incorporating the extensive research that has been conducted in the more than 25 years since its initial publication. The MBI includes three questionnaires – the Human.

By the late 1970s, questions were crystallizing: What is the burnout experience? Why is it a problem? What causes it? Answering these questions would require research tools that did not yet exist, which led to the creation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). First published in 1981 and now with its Manual in its fourth edition, the MBI is the first scientifically developed measure of burnout and is used widely in research studies around the world.

The MBI aligns with the World Health Organization’s 2019 definition of burnout as a legitimate occupational experience that organizations need to address, characterized by three dimensions:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
Reduced professional efficacy

The MBI assesses each of these three dimensions of burnout separately. Its format emerged from prior exploratory work on burnout in the 1970s, which used interviews with workers in various health and human service professions, on-site observations of the workplace, and case studies. A number of consistent themes appeared in the form of statements about personal feelings or attitudes (for example, “I feel emotionally drained from my work”), so a series of these statements became the items in the MBI measure. The MBI developed an approach based on the frequency with which people experienced those feelings, with responses ranging from “never” to “every day.”

After rigorous testing, the MBI-Human Services Survey (MBI-HSS) was published, followed by other versions, including the MBI-Educators Survey (MBI-ES) and the MBI for medical personnel (MBI-MP). The MBI-General Survey (MBI-GS) was developed for use with people in any type of occupation, and was tested in several countries, in several languages.

In all versions, the MBI yields three scores for each respondent: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. There is a continuum of frequency scores, from more positive to more negative, rather than an arbitrary dividing point between “present” and “absent.” A profile of burnout is indicated by more negative scores on all three dimensions.

Inresearchstudies, the goal has been to study what things are associated with each of the three dimensions. For example, do some types of workplace conditions make it difficult to do the job well (lower professional efficacy) or create work overload (higher exhaustion)? Does the occurrence of burnout begin with exhaustion, which then leads to cynicism and the decline in professional efficacy, or are there other paths to burnout?

Modifications and Misuses of the MBI

More recently, the MBI has been applied for other purposes, such as individual diagnosis or organizational metrics. When used correctly, these applications of the MBI can greatly benefit employees and organizations. When used incorrectly, it can result in more confusion about what burnout is rather than greater understanding. Some of these applications are even unethical.

Maslach burnout inventory (mbi questionnaire template

The fact that the MBI produces three scores has led to some challenges. This complexity has led some to seek a simpler outcome by modifying the scoring procedure. First, some people have added the three scores together. The problem with this additive approach is that the same total score can be achieved by very different combinations of the three dimensions. Another misuse has been to consider the three dimensions as “symptoms” of burnout, and to then argue that a negative score on any one of these symptoms constitutes burnout. Another oversimplification has been to use only one question to assess each dimension.

Second, some people have decided to use only one of the three dimensions of burnout (usually exhaustion), implicitly proposing a new definition of burnout. In another variation of this focus on exhaustion, some have argued that the correlation with measures of depression (which contain multiple items about exhaustion) mean that burnout is really just depression.

Third, another scoring modification has involved arbitrarily dividing the sample of respondents in half and inaccurately assuming that the half that has more negative scores is burned out, and the other half is not. Some have used the descriptions of the range of scores, which divide the range into thirds (lower, mid-range, upper), as the arbitrary cutoffs for “low, medium, and high burnout.” When their study replicates that same range, they inaccurately claim that “a third of the group is highly burned out.”

What leads to all these misuses? A major reason for these scoring modifications (and resulting inaccuracies) is that many think of burnout as some sort of medical disease or disability, and they want a single score that can diagnose whether individual employees have this disability or not, yet we never designed the MBI as a tool to diagnose an individual health problem. Indeed, from the beginning, burnout was not considered some type of personal illness or disease — a viewpoint that the WHO reiterated in its May 2019 statement. However, many forms of personal therapy or treatment can only occur, or be covered by insurance, if there is an officially recognized diagnosis within the overall health-care system. There has been continuing pressure to define burnout in medical terms to make it fit within that system.

Even more troubling is the misuse of MBI scores to identify (sometimes publicly) people who are “diagnosed” as burned out and who therefore need to be dealt with in some way (“you should seek counseling,” “your team needs to shape up,” “you should quit if you can’t handle the job”). Research studies consider this nonconfidential use of MBI scores within organizations to be unethical. Given that there is no clinical basis for assuming that burnout is a personal disability, and no evidence for established treatments for it, the use of an individual’s scores in this way is clearly wrong.

Best Practices for Using the MBI at Work

The MBI was designed for discovery — both of new information that extends our knowledge about burnout and of possible strategies for change. This discovery can also take place when organizations use the MBI for practical studies and planning. When the MBI is used correctly, and in strategic combination with other relevant information

Maslach Burnout Inventory (mbi Questionnaire