An organisational and social psychological perspective on burnout and work engagement

Work engagement is assumed to be the positive antipode of burnout. Or, as Maslach and Leiter (1997, p. 34) put it: "Energy, involvement, and efficacythese are the direct opposites of the three dimensions of burnout." According to Maslach and Leiter, work engagement is assessed by the opposite pattern of scores on the three burnout dimensions. However, this way of operationalising burnout and engagement is questionable in view of the debate on the polarity of positive and negative affect (Diener, 1999). It could be argued that instead of being two opposite poles, burnout and engagement are independent yet negatively correlated states of mind. For instance, feeling emotionally drained from one's work "once a week" by no means excludes that in the same week one may feel bursting with energy. Thus, instead of perfectly complementary and mutually exclusive states, burnout and engagement should be seen as conceptually different states that, because of their antithetical nature, are supposed to be negatively related.