The development of a proactive burnout prevention inventory: How employees can contribute to reduce burnout risks

Abstract

Proactive burnout prevention refers to a set of proactive behaviors employees may engage in to prevent burnout. Findings of a previous exploratory qualitative study indicated that employees who had to deal with high demands engaged in specific proactive behaviors in the work, home, and personal domain in order to prevent burnout. To further examine proactive burnout prevention in longitudinal quantitative research and to be able to investigate its effectiveness, an inventory for assessing these kinds of behaviors is necessary. The goal of this study was twofold: 1) to develop an inventory to assess employees’ proactive burnout prevention behaviors and examine its factorial validity, 2) to explore the broader nomological network of proactive burnout prevention behaviors by examining its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. A two‐wave longitudinal survey (T1: N = 343; T2: N = 201) was conducted. The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that proactive burnout prevention can be reliably assessed with 40 items that load on 12 factors, indicating 12 separate proactive burnout prevention behaviors. Moreover, exploration of the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the proactive burnout prevention inventory showed promising results, as expected relationships were confirmed for most behaviors. Further research is needed to substantiate the findings and examine the effectiveness of proactive burnout prevention.