Objectives: Burnout is a serious occupational outcome that have been studied in various type of organizations and economic sectors. However, the situation of university staff is not well understood, particularly for people involved in teaching and research activities in a Canadian context. This presentation reports some preliminary findings from a large longitudinal study carried out in Canada containing a subsample of university employees.
Methods: Data came from an ongoing longitudinal study started in 2019 in Canada over a large sample of employees and workplaces. Workplaces and workers are followed on an annual basis, and 5 cycles (2019-2025) of data are currently available for a sample of 12,341 workers nested in 119 workplaces. A subsample of 5269 workers from one university was available for the current study. These workers were distributed as academic managers (2.3%), professors-researchers (15.9%), lecturers (8.4%), professional-research assistants (36.5%) and administrative-service employees (36.9%).
Results: Between 2019-2024, the prevalence of burnout ranged 20.6%-25.9%.
Academic managers and professors-researchers had the highest prevalence, with burnout ranging 25.0%-33.3% for academic managers and 29.9%-36.8% for professors-researchers. Lecturers, professional-research assistants and administrative-service employees' burnout ranged 19.3%-22.1%. Multilevel logistics regression analysis adjusted for gender, age and time significantly distinguished academic managers and professors-researchers as more afflicted by burnout symptoms compared to other occupational groups. Further analyses revealed a higher level of psychological demands and working hours for these two groups of employees.
Conclusion: Everyone is important to care about, but these preliminary results suggest that academic mangers and professors-researchers should be targeted in priority for burnout interventions. The case of academic mangers is worrisome as these people are engaged not only in management duties but also involved simultaneously in teaching and research activities. Workload and overcommitted might be addressed to help reducing academic mangers and professors-researchers burnout symptoms.