Does Burnout hurt Performance? Experimental Evidence

Burnout is a phenomenon that has received significant attention in the past several decades, with meta-analyses emphasizing its adverse consequences for performance. However, a major limitation of the current literature is that it is exclusively correlational. In this study, we conduct a laboratory experiment to acquire the first causal evidence regarding the effect of burnout on performance. We study the performance of students on a standardized test. In the treatment group, burnout is induced with a recall task, while in the control group it is not. The data show that inducing burnout improves performance on the test. At the same time, we do replicate the commonly observed negative correlation between burnout and performance. Together, these results suggest that the observed correlation is driven by the effect of poor performance on feelings of burnout. We conjecture that feelings of burnout are a reaction that serves to partially offset poor performance.