The 'Strength' of Ties?: Investigating Teacher Burnout From A SocialStructural Perspective

Recent decades, there has been a growing attention for the concept of burnout. Burnout has been defined as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach & Jackson, 1981) and is commonly associated with professions characterized by a high rate of close relationships with other individuals or groups (Vandenberghe & Huberman, 1999). The teaching profession is one of those professions as the school environment is filled with close relationships with students, parents, and colleagues (Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2009). Specified for teachers, emotional exhaustion indicates a feeling of tiredness and being emotionally overextended by one’s work, depersonalization includes the unfeeling and impersonal response toward students, parents and the workplace and reduced feelings of personal accomplishment are observed when the feeling of competence diminishes and they no longer feel as they are contributing to the development of the students (Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1986). A wide array of research already investigated teacher burnout and the factors explaining the occurrence of this syndrome. Several of these studies concluded that social relationships with colleagues play a crucial role as they can both reduce or contribute to the symptoms of burnout (e.g., Abel & Sewell, 1999; Schlichte, Yssel, & Merbler, 2005). However, despite the conclusion that collegial relations might be an important aspect for understanding both the occurrence and prevention of burnout of teachers, only few researchers adopted a social network approach to investigate this syndrome from a social-structural perspective. As a result, it is, up to now, unclear how the actual social structure of the school team is related to teachers’ feelings of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and diminished personal accomplishment. In this study, the aim is therefore to understand if and to what extent the social structure of the school team can make a difference for teachers’ feelings of burnout. More specifically, we investigate if the probability of experiencing feelings of burnout is related to structure of the (close) neighborhood of the teacher and the presence of burnout in this neighborhood. We use cross-sectional data of 626 teachers in 13 Flemish secondary schools (response rate >75%), gathered through an online survey. Social Influence Models are applied to analyze the relationship between the three dimensions of burnout and the structure of the social network of the school team.status: publishe