Work engagement and burnout: Testing the theoretical continuums of identification and energy

• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21379
• Published date: 01 September 2020

QUANTITATIVE STUDY

Work engagement and burnout: Testing the

theoretical continuums of identification and

energy

Kim Nimon

1

| Brad Shuck

2

1

The University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, Texas

2

The University of Louisville, Louisville,

Kentucky

Correspondence

Kim Nimon, The University of Texas at Tyler,

3900 University Blvd, Tyler, TX 75799.

Email: kim.nimon@gmail.com

Abstract

Using meta-analytic correlations from Cole et al. (2012), we

conducted secondary data analysis to further explore the

empirical overlap between measures of work engagement

(Utretch Work Engagement Scale) and burnout (Maslach

Burnout Inventory). We found that the dimensions of work

engagement and burnout did not align with previously posi-

tioned theoretical continuums. In addition to finding a nega-

tive association between the aspects of dedication and

inefficacy, we found that aspects of vigor and absorption

were positively related to cynicism and exhaustion, respec-

tively. We also found that very little of the shared variance

between the measures of work engagement and burnout

were the result of semantic equivalence between item sets.

KEYWORDS

employee, employee engagement, employee well-being, human

resource development, stress/burnout

1|INTRODUCTION

Work engagement has a long-established line of research. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (i.e., UWES) remains

the dominant measure of work engagement in the world. New articles are published weekly that use and detail the

application, connection, and future opportunities of this wide-reaching construct, and the key phrase work engage-

ment has been cited thousands of times in the last decade, alone. It seems safe to suggest that the work engagement

construct is catching on.

In their now seminal paper on the positionality of work engagement, in defining and placing boundaries on what

exactly the construct was, Bakker, Schaufeli, Leiter, and Taris (2008) suggested that work engagement was the oppo-

site of burnout (compare Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1997), both theoretically and empirically. At the time of their

DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21379

© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Human Resource Development Quarterly. (Fall) 2020;31:301–318. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrdq 301

article (i.e., 2008), burnout had been a long and well-established construct in the counseling psychology and occupa-

tional health and safety fields of research and connecting the two made a persuasive argument. Bakker et al. (2008)

were precise in their language, offering the following:

“Accordingly, vigour and dedication are considered direct opposites of exhaustion and cynicism,

respectively, the two core symptoms of burnout. The continuum that is spanned by exhaustion and

vigour has been labelled ‘energy,’whereas the continuum that is spanned by cynicism and dedication

has been labelled ‘identification’” (p. 188) (italics added for emphasis).

This theoretical alignment has, for decades, been the cornerstone of understanding for what work engagement was,

and the standard used to interpret a very long and distinguished line of scholarship. Numerous scholars, researchers,

and practitioners have operated under the assumptionthat work engagement and burnoutwere theoretical opposites

and that the theoretically positioned continuumsoffered by Bakker et al. (2008) were well established.These continu-

ums appear in, and areused overwhelmingly, throughout the research that utilizes the UWES as anoperationalization

of work engagement. To date, thenumber of articles that use theUWES and the continuums are overwhelmingly high

and on the rise. Grounded in the Bakker et al. (2008) work, in most, if not all of the research that investigates the

UWES, scholarshave assumed that exhaustionwas the opposite of vigor and cynicismwas the opposite of dedication.

Outside of the original conceptual piece by Bakker et al. (2008), few scholars who have used the UWES—

including those in the field of Human Resource Development (HRD), to include Garg, Dar, and Mishra (2018), De

Clercq, Bouckenooghe, Raja, and Matsyborska (2014), and Rahmadani, Schaufeli, Ivanova, and Osin (2019)—have

commented on the continuums at any level. Additionally, no research that we could locate has empirically explored

the existence of the theoretical continuums of identification and energy. Despite decades of in-depth research and

scholarship in the name of advancing the work engagement construct, the original theoretical alignment that make

up the bedrock foundations of work engagement remains only a set of theoretical assumptions yet to be tested.

The present study proposed to assess the multivariate relationship between the measures of engagement and

burnout and test the viability of the theoretical continuums offered by Bakker et al. (2008). Specifically, the purpose

of our work was to empirically assess whether measures of work engagement and burnout followed the theoretical

alignment as positioned by Bakker et al. (2008). Based on the assumption of the aforementioned alignment, we

expected two or, potentially, three interpretable functions to be identified. Following the theoretical continuum

guidelines, we expected to identify a function for the vigor-exhaustion continuum (i.e., energy), a function for the

dedication-cynicism continuum (i.e., identification), and perhaps a new function for the absorption-efficacy contin-

uum, although we note that Schaufeli, Salanova, González-Romá, and Bakker (2002) previously suggested that

absorption was not the direct opposite of professional efficacy, but “rather they [were] conceptually distinct aspects

that are not the end points of some underlying continuum”(p. 74). We heeded the insight from Schaufeli et al. and

yet opted to test for the potential for a new continuum to exist through our analysis of the data from a purely

exploratory lens.

We chose canonical correlation analysis (CCA) as our interpretation tool due to the multiple predictors and out-

comes required for testing the continuum framework. Specifically, in the presence of multiple predictors

(e.g., burnout measures) and multiple outcomes (e.g., work engagement measures), CCA avoids inflation of Type I

error associated with conducting multiple regressions and honors the ecological validity of research that considers

multiple outcomes and causes simultaneously (Thompson, 2000). To be clear, we were not assessing the distinction

of burnout from engagement as that was in our opinion, demonstrated in Table 6 of Cole, Walter, Bedeian, and

O'Boyle (2012). Rather, the originality of our work is that our analyses provided an empirical test of the theoretical

continuums between measures of work engagement and burnout. In what follows, we detail the historical position-

ing of the work engagement and burnout literature, specify our method, summarize reported results, and highlight

implications through a brief discussion.

302 NIMON AND SHUCK