Predicting Early Stages of Burnout: A longitudinal study of the relationships between workplace stressors, email communication patterns and burnout.

The primary research objective of this project is to replicate the findings of a pilot project associating specific communication patterns to higher risk of burnout, in a larger sample of employees. As such, we will collect burnout and email data during one year from a population of employees in one or more organizations, identifying early indicators of burnout in the patterns of email communications of these employees. The central hypothesis of this research project is that email communication patterns are associated with early signs of burnout in employees. This hypothesis is based on the results of research done with job burnout models (Job Strain, Effort-Reward Imbalance) suggesting that chronic exposure to imbalances between work demands and job resources may result in burnout. This is combined with research showing that email communication can act as demands for employees.