Job Demands—Resources theory and self-regulation: New explanations and remedies for job burnout

“Job resources are less strongly (negatively) related to burnout than job demands, but show a consistent negative relationship with the cynicism component of burnout (Demerouti et al., 2001).”

“What we have learned about burnout Burnout has been defined as a work-related syndrome characterized by chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy (Maslach et al., 2001).”

“Job resources refer to the physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that help to achieve work goals, and encourage personal growth and development (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017).”

“Job crafting refers to the proactive adjustments individuals make in their tasks, relationships, and cognitions in order to make their work less stressful and more meaningful (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).”

“Particularly workload, role ambiguity, role conflict, role stress, stressful events, and work pressure seem important (for meta-analyses, see Alarcon, 2011; Lee & Ashforth, 1996).”

“One leadership style that has featured in the literature for several decades is transformational leadership (Bass, 1999).”

“Proactive personality is defined as the “the relatively stable tendency to effect environmental change” (Bateman & Crant, 1993, p. 103).”

“According to Crant (2000), proactivity has a positive impact on employee attitudes and behaviors because proactive individuals identify or create opportunities that produce favorable conditions for individual or team effectiveness.”

“Problem-focused coping refers to efforts to solve the problem and attempts to control the stressor, whereas emotion-focused coping involves the regulation of emotional responses to the problem and disengagement (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Skinner et al., 2003).”

“Their daily job demands start to exceed their personal and job resources (Bakker et al., 2014).”

“For example, Bakker et al. (2005) showed that work overload, emotional demands, physical demands, and work–home interference did not result in increased levels of burnout when employees experienced job autonomy, received feedback, had access to social support, or had developed a highquality…”

“How does a fulfilling and meaningful job turn into a demanding and worrying experience? Job stress may be the consequence of repetitive work activities, work pressure, bureaucracy, or role conflicts (LePine et al., 2005).”

“Finally, reduced professional efficacy has been described as a decline in one’s feelings of competence and successful achievement at work (Maslach & Leiter, 2008).”

“Examples are emotional intelligence (Salovey & Mayer, 1990), proactive personality (Bateman & Crant, 1993), and optimism (Scheier & Carver, 1992).”

“However, Sonnentag and Fritz (2007) argue that it is not the specific activities that help one to recover from job stress, but rather their underlying attributes.”

“JDR theory proposes that employees who experience work engagement (i.e., high levels of energy, dedication, and absorption) proactively try to optimize their job demands and resources through job crafting (Tims et al., 2012; Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).”

“…persistent form of exhaustion and accompanying problems, such as mental distancing from work, cognitive problems, and impaired mood that occurs after a long period of exposure to high job demands (and that only disappears after a long recovery period; Leone et al., 2008; Schaufeli et al., 2009).”

“Xanthopoulou et al. (2009a, 2009b) showed that personal resources had predictive validity for job resources, work engagement, and financial returns.”

“Recovery refers to a process of restoring the cognitive and energetic resources that have been used up during work (Sonnentag, 2003).”

“Hockey (1997) has argued that performance may be protected under stress by recruiting further resources, but only at the expense of increased effort – which comes with behavioral and physiological costs.”

“Individuals lower in coping flexibility may overuse one coping strategy, while underusing other types (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Cheng et al., 2014).”

“Ten Brummelhuis et al. (2011) found in their two-year followup study that employees who scored higher on burnout reported a stronger decrease in social support, a stronger reduction in job autonomy and information, and less opportunities to participate in decision-making (see also, De Beer et al., 2013).”

“Finally, Panagioti et al. (2017) analyzed interventions to reduce physician burnout including 20 interventions.”

“Personal resources refer to self-beliefs regarding how much control a person has over the (work) environment (Hobfoll et al., 2003).”

“For example, in a three-wave study among employees working at a chemical plant, Tims et al. (2013) showed that job crafting resulted in an increase in various job resources over time, such as skill variety, opportunities for development, and social support.”

“Research has provided strong evidence for the contention that transformational leadership has a positive impact on follower work engagement and performance (Breevaart et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2011).”

“Xanthopoulou et al. (2009a, 2009b) showed that personal resources had predictive validity for job resources, work engagement, and financial returns.”

“Moreover, those with a proactive personality are more likely to engage in job crafting – to make adjustments in job tasks, job demands and resources in order to make their work less stressful and more meaningful (Bakker et al., 2012).”

“…(2018) investigated the impact of empowering leadership: the process where a leader transfers power from oneself to employees and gives employees strength to make their own decisions by providing additional responsibility, decision-making authority over work, and resources (Ahearne et al., 2005).”

“Indeed, research has shown that EI has a positive relationship with well-being and job performance (for meta-analyses, see Martins et al., 2010; O’Boyle et al., 2011).”

“The meta-analysis by Rudolph et al. (2017) showed that job strain (exhaustion and burnout) was negatively related to job crafting.”

“Particularly workload, role ambiguity, role conflict, role stress, stressful events, and work pressure seem important (for meta-analyses, see Alarcon, 2011; Lee & Ashforth, 1996).”

“Indeed, research has shown that EI has a positive relationship with well-being and job performance (for meta-analyses, see Martins et al., 2010; O’Boyle et al., 2011).”

“Individuals under stress create obstacles because they lack energy resources and selfcontrol (Vohs & Faber, 2007) to address the demands of working life.”

“Although there are several other definitions of burnout (e.g., Demerouti et al., 2010), most approaches include the exhaustion and cynicism dimensions of burnout.”

“In addition, the negative emotions (e.g., anger, sadness, irritation) experienced by employees under stress narrow their thoughtaction repertoires (Fredrickson, 2003).”

“Although there is general consensus in the literature that the combination of high job demands and low job resources offers an important explanation for burnout (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Lesener et al., 2019), it would be very helpful to have an even more fine-grained and integrated account of the organizational and…”

“Fuller and Marler (2009) meta-analyzed the findings from 107 independent studies, and found that proactive personality is positively related to taking charge/voice behavior as well as supervisor-rated job performance.”

“These coping strategies can be classified in one of two categories: approach and avoidance coping (Tobin et al., 1989).”

“Such research would need to use a research design with repeated short-term assessments as well as repeated long-term assessments (measurement-burst designs; see Dormann & Griffin, 2015; Sliwinski, 2008).”

“They identify opportunities, take action, and persevere until the environment is in line with their needs and goals (Crant, 1995).”

“This is an ongoing process: employee job strain is dependent on daily job demands and resources (Bakker, 2014), and thus management and leaders should continuously communicate their vision and provide direction and support (Breevaart et al., 2014; Kelemen et al., 2020).”

“However, avoidance coping may be maladaptive in the long term, because the stressor is not controlled (Cheng et al., 2014).”

“In a similar vein, Major et al. (2006) showed that, controlling for the Big Five, proactive personality uniquely predicted objective development activity (i.e., the number of training courses registered for during a six-month period and the number of hours spent in training during that period),…”

“Relatedly, emotional labor theory proposes that the necessity to regulate emotions at work is associated with increased job strain but not for high-EI employees who tend to choose the most effective emotion regulation strategies to deal with their own emotions (Grandey & Melloy, 2017).”

“, 2005), and negatively related to job performance as reported by the supervisor, colleagues, and clients (Taris, 2006).”

“Bakker and Costa (2014) define self-undermining as “behavior that creates obstacles that may undermine performance” (p. 115).”

“Whereas work engagement is a positive outcome and predictor of job crafting (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; Tims et al., 2015), the relationship between job strain and job crafting is negative.”

“Meta-analytic research has shown that these four strategies indeed reduce feelings of fatigue and increase feelings of energy (Bennett et al., 2018).”

“As a consequence, employees will not be able to deal adequately with their future day-to-day job demands, erode their personal resources (Hahn et al., 2011), and lack the energy needed to mobilize their job resources such as social support and feedback (Bakker & Oerlemans, 2019).”

“When employees are chronically fatigued and cynical about their work, they report severe psychological health problems (e.g., Shirom et al., 2005; Toker & Biron, 2012).”

“, 2017); it fosters agentic employee work behaviors and reduces employee job strain and burnout (Slemp et al., 2018).”

“These resources help employees to deal effectively with their hindrance and challenge job demands (Breevaart & Bakker, 2018).”

“Regrettably, as shown in Figure 1, the research evidence indicates that when employees are exposed to high job demands and experience high levels of job strain, they are less likely to engage in recovery activities and less able to recuperate (e.g., Kinnunen & Feldt, 2013; Sonnentag, 2012).”

“In addition, personal demands like workaholism and perfectionism may act in a similar way, and facilitate loss spirals of job demands and burnout (e.g., Harari et al., 2018; Hill & Curran, 2016).”

“Wang et al. (2017) showed that transformational leadership has a positive relationship with employee job crafting in the form of increasing challenges and job resources.”

“In contrast, individual interventions are bottom-up change initiatives that target individual employees (Bakker, 2017).”

“Moreover, daily recovery experiences during off-job time are positively related to next-day work engagement and job performance (e.g., Binnewies et al., 2009; Ten Brummelhuis & Bakker, 2012a).”

“In line with this reasoning, several studies indeed demonstrated that depression and anxiety are positively related to coping inflexibility (Kato, 2012; Stange et al., 2017).”

“Such research would need to use a research design with repeated short-term assessments as well as repeated long-term assessments (measurement-burst designs; see Dormann & Griffin, 2015; Sliwinski, 2008).”

“Key personal resources refer to management resources that facilitate the selection, alteration, and implementation of other resources (Thoits, 1994).”

“Job demands and strain may lead to maladaptive self-regulation cognitions and behaviors, because when employees experience higher job strain levels, they find it more difficult to concentrate and make more work-related mistakes (Van der Linden et al., 2005).”

“Kim et al. (2011) conducted a study among social workers who were surveyed annually over a three-year period.”

“Moreover, job crafting will generally be less likely among those with high personal demands, since job crafting also has energetic costs (Bakker & Oerlemans, 2019).”

“Ten Brummelhuis et al. (2011) found in their two-year followup study that employees who scored higher on burnout reported a stronger decrease in social support, a stronger reduction in job autonomy and information, and less opportunities to participate in decision-making (see also, De Beer et al., 2013).”

“In their study among 165 employees and their supervisors, Greguras and Diefendorff (2010) showed that proactive personality predicted in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (e.g., altruism, courtesy, and sportsmanship), through need satisfaction.”

“It is therefore not surprising that burnout (particularly exhaustion) is positively related to employee absenteeism (Toppinen-Tanner et al., 2005), and negatively related to job performance as reported by the supervisor, colleagues, and clients (Taris, 2006).”

“Research has provided strong evidence for the contention that transformational leadership has a positive impact on follower work engagement and performance (Breevaart et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2011).”

“Individuals with a high level of EI generally possess excellent emotion appraisal and coping skills, and therefore their experience of stress from emotionally demanding events is reduced (Pekaar et al., 2018a; Zeidner et al., 2008).”

“Moreover, Shin et al. (2014) found in their metaanalysis of 36 studies that burnout is negatively related to problem-focused coping (e.g., social support seeking, reappraisal), and positively related to emotion-focused coping (e.g., wishful thinking, denial, self-blame).”

“Dreison et al. (2018) analyzed the effects of burnout interventions among mental health providers reported in the past 35 years.”

“However, mild burnout complaints have also been related to physical consequences such as an increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes, and all-cause mortality (Ahola, 2007; Ahola et al., 2010).”

“This is an ongoing process: employee job strain is dependent on daily job demands and resources (Bakker, 2014), and thus management and leaders should continuously communicate their vision and provide direction and support (Breevaart et al.”

“It is conceivable that other self-regulation strategies such as strengths use, playful work design, and proactive vitality management (Bakker & Van Woerkom, 2017) will also be effective in dealing with job strain.”

“Research of the past five years has shown that job crafting training can be effective (for a meta-analysis, see Oprea et al., 2019), and may even have positive effects on personal and job resources assessed one year after the intervention (Van Wingerden et al., 2017).”

“Ten Brummelhuis et al. (2011) found in their two-year followup study that employees who scored higher on burnout reported a stronger decrease in social support, a stronger reduction in job autonomy and information, and less opportunities to participate in decision-making (see also, De Beer et al.,…”

“Using a three-wave panel design with employees from three different European countries, Vogt et al. (2016) showed that job crafting had a positive relationship with future personal resources such as hope, resilience, self-efficacy, and optimism.”

“Previous research has indeed shown that burnout is positively related to the (over)use of emotion-focused coping (e.g., Antoniou et al., 2013; Chwalisz et al., 1992).”

“Research of the past five years has shown that job crafting training can be effective (for a meta-analysis, see Oprea et al., 2019), and may even have positive effects on personal and job resources assessed one year after the intervention (Van Wingerden et al., 2017).”

“Previous research has indeed shown that burnout is positively related to the (over)use of emotion-focused coping (e.g., Antoniou et al., 2013; Chwalisz et al., 1992).”

“Similarly, a recent meta-analysis of training interventions that aimed to increase optimism, self-efficacy, hope, and resilience showed that when employees increase these personal resources, they improve their well-being and job performance (Lupsa et al., 2019).”

“This means that when leaders use more intellectual stimulation and individual consideration, their followers experience the trust and selfefficacy needed to engage in proactive work behaviors such as job crafting (see also, Hetland et al., 2018).”

“More specifically, we speak of recovery when employees unwind after effort expenditure, and when their cognitive and energetic resources return to baseline (Sonnentag & Natter, 2004).”

“Coping inflexibility impairs the ability to adjust to stressors and increases vulnerability for depression (Stange et al., 2017).”

“Research has shown that such training can be effective and increase sleep-quality, feelings of mastery, and self-efficacy (Hahn et al., 2011; Siu et al., 2014).”

“Maricuţoiu et al. (2016) meta-analyzed the effects of 47 intervention studies among employees from various occupational backgrounds.”

“Moreover, the burnout syndrome is an independent risk factor for type 2 diabetes and physician-diagnosed myocardial infarctions (Ahola & Hakanen, 2014), and increases the risk of all-cause mortality or premature death (e.g., Ahola et al., 2010).”

“This is an ongoing process: employee job strain is dependent on daily job demands and resources (Bakker, 2014), and thus management and leaders should continuously communicate their vision and provide direction and support (Breevaart et al., 2014; Kelemen et al., 2020).”

“Thun and Bakker (2018) investigated the impact of empowering leadership: the process where a leader transfers power from oneself to employees and gives employees strength to make their own decisions by providing additional responsibility, decision-making authority over work, and resources (Ahearne…”

“Personal demands have been defined as “the requirements that individuals set for their own performance and behavior that force them to invest effort in their work and are therefore associated with physical and psychological costs” (Barbier et al., 2013, p. 751).”

“Dimoff et al. (2016) evaluated the effectiveness of a mental health training program among two samples of organizational leaders.”

“…it is crucial that organizations continuously monitor and optimize job characteristics – for example, by setting realistic goals and challenges, optimizing job demands, and by providing sufficient job resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017, 2018; Demerouti & Peeters, 2018; Holman & Axtell, 2016).”

“Regrettably, as shown in Figure 1, the research evidence indicates that when employees are exposed to high job demands and experience high levels of job strain, they are less likely to engage in recovery activities and less able to recuperate (e.g., Kinnunen & Feldt, 2013; Sonnentag, 2012).”

“When leaders use an autonomy-supportive leadership style, they acknowledge employee perspectives, encourage self-initiation, and offer opportunities for choice and input (Reeve, 2015).”

“Alternatively, major life events like a divorce or illness of a family member may disrupt effective use of job resources and undermine effective functioning at work (Bakker et al., 2019).”

“, creativity) – often resulting in successful performance, playful work design refers to redesigning the work experience so that it is more fun and more meaningful (Scharp et al., 2019).”

“Indeed, several studies in occupational health psychology have shown that job demands and job strain are reciprocal: job demands are the causal predictors of various stress responses (exhaustion, burnout, health complaints), but job strain is also a causal predictor of job demands (Tang, 2014).”

“Specifically, they are more likely than others to proactively manage their vitality (Op den Kamp et al., 2018), and to regularly distance themselves from work to recover from the work-related effort.”

“For instance, individuals with a more optimistic and proactive personality (key resources) are more likely to begin a difficult task and more prone to actively seek support for completing their tasks (Hardré, 2003).”

“In a similar vein, Kaluza et al. (2020) showed that leaders’ perceptions of organizational health climate were positively related to their health mindsets (i.e., their health awareness).”

“In a similar vein, approach or problem-focused coping may generally be effective to cope with stress, but may be ineffective if the stressor is uncontrollable (Britt et al., 2016).”

“For example, in a study among 81 home care organizations and more than 26,000 nurses, Taris et al. (2003) showed that various organizational interventions, such as employee participation in the planning of tasks, new protocols, task restructuring, and on-the-job training improved job demands and…”

“Transformational leaders also satisfy their followers’ basic needs by providing them with tasks that match their abilities, feedback, support, and job control (Hetland et al., 2015).”

“Leader autonomy support is positively related to transformational leadership (Gilbert et al., 2017); it fosters agentic employee work behaviors and reduces employee job strain and burnout (Slemp et al.”

“Individuals with a high level of EI generally possess excellent emotion appraisal and coping skills, and therefore their experience of stress from emotionally demanding events is reduced (Pekaar et al., 2018a; Zeidner et al., 2008).”

“One notable exception is the study by Sonnenschein et al. (2007), who investigated differences in exhaustion/fatigue between healthy employees and a group that was diagnosed as clinically burned-out.”

“Longitudinal cohort studies have suggested that employees go through the maladaptive regulation feedback loop again and again before job strain develops in full-blown and enduring burnout (Leone et al., 2008).”

“…et al. (2011) found in their two-year followup study that employees who scored higher on burnout reported a stronger decrease in social support, a stronger reduction in job autonomy and information, and less opportunities to participate in decision-making (see also, De Beer et al., 2013).”

“In a review, Bakker & De Vries (2021) concluded that, over the course of time, job stress/burnout predicts decreased attempts of job crafting (and reduced recovery) and increased levels of self-undermining and avoidance coping.”

“Knowing the critical importance of job burnout, the scholarly interest in understanding the factors of job burnout has increased over the past two decades [8,9].”

“…perspective, JD-R theory remains an important framework for understanding organizational outcomes such as performance, engagement and burnout (Bakker & de Vries, 2021), while P-O fit, already considered important for understanding career choice and -development (Schneider, 1987a), is…”

“Lack of control over work, lack of regular feedback, and lack of professional development all contribute to worsening burnout [16].”

“Moreover, the idea of coping flexibility is added to recent extension of the JD-R model (Demerouti, 2015; Bakker and de Vries, 2021).”

“Clearly, there is an increasing demand for wellness-support methods at work [17].”

“For instance, the concept of gain and loss cycles has been incorporated in the extended version of the job – demands – resources model in its theorizing on occupational well-being in general (Bakker, Demerouti et al., 2023) and burnout in particular (Bakker & Costa, 2014; Bakker & de Vries, 2021).”

“Much work has since explored complimentary theoretical approaches (e.g., Job Demands-Resources Theory; Bakker & de Vries, 2021) and clarified burnout’s distinctiveness from other wellbeing issues (e.g., depression; Meier & Kim, 2022).”

“This lends support to previous evidence generated by Dhiman,(71) and Bakker and de Vries.(75) The pressure of being available 24/7 and the need to keep checking work-related updates is a psychological stressor depleting employees of key resources.”

“These findings are consistent with the extant literature that suggests that the satisfaction of psychological needs reduces burnout, even after taking into account the negative effects of job demands [47].”

“In that sense, Maslach [17] declares that ethical conflicts are one of the main antecedents of burnout.”

“From the perspective of job-demands resources (see Bakker & De Vries, 2021), the absence of supporting resources (i.e. lack of management support, poor communication, meaningless work) in the face of escalating job demands (i.e. emotional labour, administrative overload, labour disputes) can have a…”

“Furthermore, increased job strain can lead employees to adopt maladaptive coping strategies, exacerbating depression and anxiety (45).”

“It may be speculated that this is probably so because, applying the idea of loss resources cycle [9] together with the self-weakening concept (Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), those employees who perceive workrelated stress are more likely to have self-debilitating behaviors, which will lead to higher levels of job demands…”

“An explanation for why this relation is weaker could be that employees with burnout symptoms tend to cope with demands by working even harder, attempting to maintain their performance levels (Bakker & de Vries, 2021; van Dam et al., 2013).”

“Even though there may have been a recent imbalance of studies concerning the psychometric properties of instruments in burnout research [17], it remains critical for researchers to consider any legal and ethical obligations and their theoretical assumptions when it comes to the operationalisation of burnout for the ad…”

“In the JD-R theory, personal resources contribute to individuals’ perception of their ability to successfully control and impact their environment, enabling them to adapt successfully [17].”

“Also, through their occupations, people can make a difference and have a positive impact on themselves and others [1].”

“This is consistent with the fi ndings (Bakker & de Vries, 2021) based on the COR theory that organizational resources (healthy leadership) and personal resources (EI) contribute to the burnout alleviation.”

“Additionally, measures should be taken to optimize resources, i.e., providing each employee with the right amount of job resources to maintain an optimal resource level [60,61].”

“The detrimental effects of burnout have been largely documented in past studies (Bakker & de Vries, 2020; Goering et al., 2017), especially among teachers (Capone & Petrillo, 2020).”

“, low social support) to cope with these demands [11].”

“…in psychological flexibility may adopt healthier (e.g., acceptance-based) self-regulation strategies, which require less internal vigilance and cognitive-affective reactivity, thereby imposing fewer attentional and energetic resource costs (Bakker & de Vries, 2021; Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010).”

“Although emotional exhaustion has been predominantly attributed to excessive and repeated job strain (Bakker and Demer-outi, 2007; Bakker & De Vries, 2021), studies indicate that emotional exhaustion may affect how individuals respond to job demands and resources.”

“Another theory is the self-regulation theory, which suggests that personality traits such as Conscientiousness and emotional stability are important predictors of job satisfaction because they influence an individual’s ability to manage their own behavior and emotions in the workplace [23,24].”

“Recent research suggests that job demands lead to burnout via reduced adaptive coping and increased maladaptive coping (Bakker & de Vries, 2021).”

“Research in recent decades has revealed that burnout is often the result of high job demands—aspects of the job that require sustained physical, emotional, or cognitive effort [19].”

“Consequently, employees become chronically exhausted and psychologically distance themselves from their work, thereby impairing feelings of meaningfulness and the fulfilment of inherent psychological needs [27].”

“The JD-R model elucidates how work stress, as a form of job demand, affects burnout by depleting an individual’s psychological and physiological resources [10].”

“…the work environment is composed of: (a) JD (physical, social, and organizational factors that require effort and costs) (Bakker and Demerouti 2017; Bakker and de Vries 2021) which are not necessarily negative but may require an activation effort; (b) job resources which represent a set of…”

“In studies focused on nurses’ job performance, two variables—self-resilience and self-efficacy—are commonly involved, as they are shown to alleviate symptoms of depression [25], reduce burnout and anxiety [26, 27], increase job engagement [28], and help achieve work goals [24].”

“Different reviews have shown relationships between burnout and more than a hundred symptoms that affect emotions and affects, cognitions, psychological well-being, attitudes, and behaviors at work [3,4].”

“This gradual stress process will eventually lead to lasting burnout [66], which is not conducive to the output of enterprise innovation and performance.”

“Moreover, workers can actively adopt self-regulation strategies to influence their own job characteristics; that is, they may optimize their job demands and resources through job crafting (adaptive self-regulation) or undermine their own functioning at work (maladaptive selfregulation) [30].”

“Yet, the impact of job stressors on emotional exhaustion is no less concerning (Bakker & de Vries, 2021; Olivier et al., 2021).”

“From a research perspective, our results contribute to strengthening the literature that supports the easy and versatile implementation of the JD-R model in different contexts and situations (Bakker and de Vries, 2021).”

“Bakker and de Vries (2021) find that increased job demands and decreased job resources contribute to high stress that leads to burnout.”

“This maintenance of high job demands involves the loss of energy and resources [21], which has compelled these professionals to develop/use some personal resources that may protect them against the impact of these job demands and the lack of job resources, in order to restore this energy loss [22,23].”