Symptoms of Burnout in the Workplace: Comparison Between the Older and Younger Employees in Slovenian Companies

It is important to know that a satisfied and motivated employee is a vital prerequisite for a healthy company. Stressful, depressed, and dissatisfied employees would not be able to obtain the same quality level of work and productivity as those employees with low stress and high satisfaction. From this perspective, it is important that employers can create a safe and friendly environment to work. Further, it has become important to understand the role of individual differences in examining the effects of job characteristics on job attitudes. That means that job characteristics are not experienced in the same way by all workers. Given the demographic shifts in today’s workplace, worker age would appear to be such an important individual difference. The role of age in the relationship between job characteristics and job attitudes is important, because with the aging population, it is important to see how jobs might be redesigned to enable people to continue to work successfully. To examine the interplay between age and work characteristics is appropriate because people generally spend a significant part of their life span working and, therefore, have ample opportunity to display these adaptive processes throughout their working lives, but the role of age in job design has largely been ignored. The main aim of this paper is to present burnout in the workplace of older employees compared to younger employees in Slovenian companies. We examined burnout in the workplace with physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms. The paper reports on a research including a survey between two age groups of employees, namely, the younger employees that were classified in the group of under 50 years of age and the older employees that were classified in the group of above 50 years of age. Since the Kolmogorov–Smirnov and Shapiro–Wilk test showed that the data were not normally distributed, the nonparametric Mann–Whitney U test was used to verify differences in the physical symptoms of burnout, emotional symptoms of burnout, and behavioral symptoms of burnout in the workplace between two groups. The results show that there are significant differences in the great majority of the variables describing the physical symptoms of burnout, emotional symptoms of burnout, and behavioral symptoms of burnout in the workplace between younger and older employees in Slovenian companies.