Personality characteristics and vulnerability to burnout: An explanatory hypothesis of teachers' distress

Researches and interventions on burnout focused primarily on organizational and cultural context, showing their predictive capabilities on that construct. Individual factors had been studied mostly in terms of coping strategies and of locus of control, but it is still relatively unknown how the personality and the relational aspects affect the health of the professionals and their work outcomes, as pointed out by many researchers. This research aims to shed light on this aspects using the Personal Meaning Organizations model (Guidano and Liotti, 1983), trying to show its applicability outside of the clinical context in which it was formulated and developed in origin. The hypothesis of the authors is that different patterns of meaning attribution are related to specific vulnerability to the various aspects that contribute to generate the burnout. The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Questionnaire for the evaluation of Personal Meaning Organizations (QSP) were submitted to a sample of 566 teachers from 14 Italian schools. The results show significant differences between the four Organizations in the scores of the Emotional Exhaustion and Personal Accomplishment scales of the MBI, while the dimension of Depersonalization is related to the number of years of work experience. The authors believe therefore that it is important for the teachers' wellbeing to propose training and interventions programs that take into account the individual differences in relational and intrapsychic functioning. © FrancoAngeli.