RESEARCH_FILE
Christina Maslach
University of California, Berkeley
Known for:Creator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, and pioneer of the three-dimensional model of burnout (exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced efficacy)
Key findings
- 1981
With Susan Jackson, Maslach developed and validated the MBI, establishing burnout as a measurable three-dimensional construct — emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment — and demonstrating that burnout was more common in human-services occupations with chronic interpersonal demands. The measurement of experienced burnout ↗
- 2016
With Michael Leiter, Maslach reviewed three decades of burnout research and argued that effective interventions require addressing both individual coping strategies and organizational conditions — workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values — with purely individual interventions showing limited long-term effects. Burnout: 35 years of research and practice ↗