Whether academics’ job performance makes a difference to burnout and the effect of psychological counselling—comparison of four types of performers

Abstract

Treating burnout as an independent variable while performance is the dependent variable, earlier studies revealed that job burnout experienced by academics adversely affects how well they perform. Whether performance may contribute to the emergence of burnout is yet to be analyzed—it is an issue investigated in this paper. Readjusting the nature of the variables, this quantitative study adopted group regression and it discovered that the performance of academics instead regulates their burnout without making performance a consequence of burnout—a new dynamic that challenges the earlier assumption. Following this earlier belief, counselling strategy to boost the employees’ psyche was deemed to be the main post-measurement tool to deal with the burnout crisis. With respect to both tenets (current and earlier), psychological counselling was treated as a moderating variable to check whether it is important enough in removing the burnout felt by employees so that they subsequently could function better. It is further discovered that although psychological counselling removes employees’ burnout to some extent, it failed to transform them into better-functioning people. This study suggests a pre-measurement counselling strategy will ensure academics are competently engaged since ensuring competency is a fundamental aspect of eliminating a job burnout crisis. The sustained competency of employees will eventually prevent burnout and may halt the transmission of a burnout crisis at large—it adds to this study’s theoretical contribution to the topic.