Burnout as Social Information: How Coworker Burnout Level and Coworker Burnout Consistency Interact With Mastery Goal Orientation to Affect Work Performance

Previous research has suggested that employees tend to ‘catch’ burnout from their coworkers and then to perform less satisfactorily. This burnout contagion mechanism cannot, however, explain why some individuals are able to take preemptive actions to defend themselves against a vulnerable environment. Using a social information processing perspective of the conservation of resources theory, we theorized that coworker burnout (i.e., the average burnout level of all team members, excluding the focal employee) serves as a social cue that guides individuals regarding the amount of effort they should put into their work in order to maintain a high level of work performance. The results revealed that coworker burnout was negatively related to employee work performance through reduced work effort when most coworkers (rather than a few) within a work group experienced high levels of burnout (i.e., there was a high consistency of coworker burnout) and when the focal employees had low levels of mastery goal orientation. This negative indirect relationship was buffered when either the coworker burnout consistency was low or the employees' mastery goal orientation was high. This conditional, indirect linkage between coworker burnout and employee work performance, via work effort, maintained its significance even after controlling for the burnout contagion mechanism (i.e., the extent to which the focal employee caught coworker burnout).