A Predictive Model of Job Burnout Based on Social, Emotional, and Organizational Factors: A Multilevel Approach

Abstract

This study aimed to develop a multilevel conceptual model for explaining and predicting job burnout through the interaction of social factors, emotional processes, and organizational conditions. This qualitative study was conducted using a thematic analysis approach. The study population comprised employees, supervisors, and managers working in public, semi-public, and private organizations in Tehran who had sustained experience of occupational pressures and burnout-related symptoms. Participants were recruited through purposive maximum-variation sampling, and recruitment continued until theoretical and meaning saturation was achieved. The final sample consisted of 24 participants, including 13 women and 11 men. Data were collected exclusively through individual semi-structured interviews lasting between 45 and 78 minutes. Interviews were audio-recorded with permission, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using NVivo software. The analytical process involved familiarization with the transcripts, initial coding, theme generation, theme review, definition and naming of themes, and development of the final multilevel model. Member reflection, peer review of coding, maintenance of an audit trail, reflexive note-taking, and thick contextual description were used to enhance the credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability of the findings. Four main categories were identified: erosion of social connectedness and professional support, accumulation of emotional strain and emotional incongruence, burnout-producing organizational structures and practices, and a multilevel cycle of resource loss. Insufficient managerial and collegial support, interpersonal conflict, occupational isolation, emotional suppression, surface acting, inadequate psychological recovery, excessive workload, role ambiguity and conflict, organizational injustice, job insecurity, and controlling leadership were reported as major antecedents of burnout. Organizational conditions appeared to intensify emotional demands and weaken social relationships. In turn, emotional exhaustion and cynicism reduced employees’ participation, help-seeking, and social interaction, thereby creating a self-reinforcing burnout cycle. Job burnout should not be understood merely as an individual vulnerability or a failure of personal coping. Rather, it develops through dynamic interactions among individual, interpersonal, team, managerial, and organizational factors. The proposed model suggests that sustainable prevention requires simultaneous reduction of chronic job demands, improvement of organizational justice, development of supportive leadership, strengthening of psychological safety and workplace relationships, and provision of genuine opportunities for emotional and physical recovery. Individual resilience training alone is unlikely to produce lasting outcomes when the organizational sources of resource depletion remain unchanged.