Vulnerability and resilience factors in the development of burnout and depressive symptoms among managers

Psychological demands in the workplace play an essential role and are intensively discussed in society, science and practice. However, managers' health has not received much attention in the discussion so far. This is particularly surprising since managers play an important role not only for employees' health but also for companies from an economic point of view. Likewise, indvididual level factors, personal resources and their influence on the relationships between working conditions and health have not received much attention in the discussion as well. Therefore, the present synopsis presents the results of four papers derived from a scientific project focusing on manager's health, which was initiated by the Centre of Clinical Psychology and Rehabilitation of the Uni-versity of Bremen. First, a review summarizes the current research state of manager's health. The results of publications II-IV are focusing on more specific research questions regarding the moderating role of individual level factors which are answered by analyz-ing original data. Data of the multi-centric study was collected from managers of the working population (N = 282) and managers who were inpatients and treated in clinics (N = 252). Results of the review show that managers have a slightly higher risk to suffer from mental health problems compared to employees. Moreover, results reveal that job demands and resources can influence the strength of these impairments. Additionally, results of analysis with original data show moderating effects of premorbid personality and core self-evaluations (CSE) in the relation between working conditions, psychologi-cal detachment and psychological health among managers. Thus, the present study high-lights both, the influence of working conditions and individual level factors in the de-velopment of health-related drawbacks such as burnout or depressive symptoms. The present study contributes to the current literature not only by analyzing complex rela-tions between individual factors, environmental factors and psychological health in more detail but also by delivering results that could be helpful to draw a distinction between the concepts of burnout and depression. By integrating the found results into a broader scientific context of neuroendocrinological and neurocognitive studies it can be con-cluded that personality factors may be closer related to depressive symptoms than to burnout