Abstract:

The purpose of the paper is to measure the perception of the phenomenon of burnout among medical, educational and higher education workers in Poland. Professional burnout was treated as a psychological syndrome resulting from chronic stress experienced by employees, as a result of impaired balance between work environment and individual capabilities. The conceptualization of empirical research was based on the acceptance of the syndrome as a universal phenomenon, occurring among various professions, but above all in the field of professions related to helping others. Two types of questionnaires were used for the measurement. The first was the LBQ Professional Burnout Questionnaire, which is an adaptation of the Italian Link Burnout Questionnaire. This tool enables diagnosis of four aspects of burnout, i.e. psychophysical exhaustion, lack of involvement in client relationships, lack of professional effectiveness and disappointment professional. The second is an author`s questionnaire designed to assess the probability of the phenomenon among Polish workers. The study was conducted in June and July 2017 as part of the transnational cooperation project, which aims to develop an effective prevention tool for burnout. The article presents the results of using two methods of econometric modelling to identify differences between employees in terms of main predictors of occupational burnout (logistic regression) and to evaluate the level of experienced burnout symptoms (classification method - two-steps cluster analysis). The obtained results show that burnout is a problem in each of the occupational groups covered by the research, which is the justification for a deeper exploration of this phenomenon, especially in the sector of higher education. There are some universal predictors of burnout for all occupational groups, but some are specific to a given profession and burnout area.