What is occupational burnout?
From Maslach to the Job Demands-Resources model
The concept of occupational burnout was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s by psychologist Christina Maslach, who described it as a response to chronic stress in jobs involving close contact with people. Her classic model identified three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (cynicism), and reduced sense of professional accomplishment. Since 2019, the World Health Organization has classified burnout in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic, unmanaged workplace stress — not as a medical condition in itself.
The OLBI model — a different angle on burnout
This questionnaire uses a newer, alternative model — the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI), developed by Evangelia Demerouti and Arnold Bakker at the University of Oldenburg. Unlike the classic Maslach approach, OLBI focuses on two broader dimensions: exhaustion (persistent physical, emotional, and cognitive fatigue) and disengagement from work (a gradual withdrawal and growing distance from one's tasks). The model grew out of the broader Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework, according to which burnout emerges when the demands placed on an employee persistently outstrip the resources available to them (time, support, control over tasks, skills).
Why positively and negatively worded items?
A distinctive feature of OLBI is that in both dimensions, half of the items are worded directly (e.g., "I feel exhausted") and half are worded in reverse (e.g., "I easily maintain my energy," reverse-scored when calculating the result). This design guards against the tendency to automatically agree with every statement (so-called acquiescence bias), and is one of OLBI's advantages over older, purely negatively-worded questionnaires.
Psychometric properties
In validation studies, the reliability (Cronbach's alpha) of the exhaustion dimension typically falls between .74 and .87, and the disengagement dimension between .70 and .83 — good to very good results for a self-report questionnaire. The two-factor structure of the model (exhaustion and disengagement as distinct, though correlated, dimensions) has been repeatedly confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis across countries, languages, and industries — from healthcare to aviation to education.
Burnout and work engagement
An interesting feature of the OLBI model is that the same two dimensions — when the direction of interpretation is reversed — can describe the opposite pole: work engagement (energy and identification with one's tasks). In this view, burnout and engagement are treated as two ends of the same continuum, rather than entirely separate phenomena.
Limitations
This questionnaire measures subjective, current feelings about work — it does not constitute a clinical diagnosis or a formal assessment. Your result may change depending on your current work situation, workload at a given time, or general health. If your result indicates elevated or high burnout and this feeling persists over time, it's worth talking about it with someone you trust, a manager, HR, or a professional — a psychologist or a doctor.
