“Job burnout” is a phrase we Americans toss around more than our footballs. Some of us misuse the term as another excuse to take a “mental health day” off from work, but still more of us may be in denial of our own dangerous exhaustion. What causes burnout, and how can we prevent it?

New research shows that burnout is caused by a mismatch between a person's unconscious needs and the opportunities and demands at the workplace. These results have implications for the prevention of job burnout. A new study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology shows that such mismatches put employees at risk of burnout.

Burnout is a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion from work, which results in a lack of motivation, low efficiency, and a helpless feeling. Its health effects include anxiety, cardiovascular disease, immune disorders, insomnia, and depression. The financial burden from absenteeism, employee turnover, reduced productivity, and medical, legal, and insurance expenses due to burnout and general work-related stress is staggering: for example, the American Institute of Stress estimates the total cost to American enterprises at $300 billion per year.

In the new study, researchers from the Universities of Zurich and Leipzig show that the unconscious needs of employees - their so-called "implicit motives" - play an important role in the development of burnout. The researchers focus on two important motives: the power motive, that is, the need to take responsibility for others, maintain discipline, and engage in arguments or negotiation, in order to feel strong and self-efficacious; and the affiliation motive, the need for positive personal relations, in order to feel trust, warmth, and belonging. A mismatch between job characteristics and either implicit motive can cause burnout, the results show. Moreover, a mismatch in either direction is risky: employees can get burned out when they have too much or not enough scope for power or affiliation compared to their individual needs.

"We found that the frustration of unconscious affective needs, caused by a lack of opportunities for motive-driven behavior, is detrimental to psychological and physical well-being. The same is true for goal-striving that doesn't match a well-developed implicit motive for power or affiliation, because then excessive effort is necessary to achieve that goal. Both forms of mismatch act as 'hidden stressors' and can cause burnout," says the leading author, Veronika Brandstätter, Professor of Psychology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Brandstätter and colleagues recruited 97 women and men between 22 and 62 through the Swiss Burnout website, an information resource and forum for Swiss people suffering from burnout. Participants completed questionnaires about their physical well-being, degree of burnout, and the characteristics of their job, including its opportunities and demands.

The greater the mismatch between someone's affiliation motive and the scope for personal relations at the job, the higher the risk of burnout, show the researchers. Likewise, adverse physical symptoms, such as headache, chest pain, faintness, and shortness of breath, became more common with increasing mismatch between an employee's power motive and the scope for power in his or her job.

Importantly, these results immediately suggest that interventions that prevent or repair such mismatches could increase well-being at work and reduce the risk of burnout.

"A starting point could be to select job applicants in such a way that their implicit motives match the characteristics of the open position. Another strategy could be so-called "job crafting", where employees proactively try to enrich their job in order to meet their individual needs. For example, an employee with a strong affiliation motive might handle her duties in a more collaborative way and try to find ways to do more teamwork," says Brandstätter.