Emotional Exhaustion, Placement Anxiety, and Academic Burnout: A Sentiment-Based Study of Mba Students

This study empirically examines the simultaneous influence of emotional exhaustion and placement anxiety on academic burnout among MBA students in India — a relationship that remains underexplored in the management education literature. A structured questionnaire comprising 18 Likert- scale items grounded in the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) and the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory-Student Version was administered to 84 students (Semester II and IV) at CMS Business School, JAIN (Deemed-to-be University), Bengaluru, during the active placement season of February 2026. Data were analysed using Cronbach\\\'s alpha reliability assessment, Pearson correlation, and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multiple regression. A VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and Sentiment Reasoner) lexicon-based sentiment analysis was applied to open-ended student responses to provide qualitative corroboration of the quantitative findings. Findings reveal that emotional exhaustion (β = 0.771, p < 0.001) and placement anxiety (β = 0.311, p < 0.001) are both significant positive predictors of academic burnout, together explaining 94.9% of its variance (R² = 0.949, F = 759.7, p < 0.001). All three constructs are very strongly intercorrelated (r > 0.90). Students actively participating in placement activities without a confirmed offer exhibited the highest burnout scores across all constructs, while those who had received at least one offer showed markedly lower scores — a pattern consistent with Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory. Sentiment analysis corroborated the quantitative results: negative qualitative sentiment correlated significantly with higher burnout across all measures (r ≈ −0.68, p < 0.001). The study contributes theoretically by establishing placement anxiety as a distinct burnout predictor and by validating sentiment analysis as a methodological complement to psychometric scales in educational burnout research.