Burnout refers to the exhaustion of employees’ capacity to maintain an intense involvement that has a meaningful impact at work. Later, burnout was defined as a state of exhaustion in which one is cynical about the value of one’s occupation and doubtful of one’s capacity to perform.

Burnout discussions began within human services because they were better able to give voice to issues of emotions, values and relationships with people. The roots of burnout are embedded within broad social, economic and cultural developments:

1. A large influx in the human services with the goal of eradicating poverty
   However, this was not possible due to the perpetuating factors of poverty, frustrating the idealists.
2. Professionalization of service industry
   This led organizations to have different values in the service industry than the values of the service providers (i.e. employees).
3. Cultural revolution
   This led to a decrease in prestige of most service jobs but an increase in demands of care, service and empathy from service recipients.
4. Flexible capitalism
   This is the replacement of traditional, rigid, homogeneous and predictable social institutions by heterogeneity and continuously changing social institutions. This led to social fragmentation which decreases community support and can foster burnout.
5. Development of narcistic culture
   This is the development of a culture where people demand immediate gratification of desires but remain perpetually unsatisfied.
6. Transformation from industrial society to service industry
   This led to an increase in psychological pressures.

It is possible that ideological communities prevent burnout from happening because it provides a collective identity that prevents burnout from occurring because of social commitment (1), a sense of communion (2), contact with the collective whole (3) and shared strong values (4).

The lack of reciprocity refers to the discrepancy between professionals’ efforts and the rewards they received in terms of recognition and gratitude. This fosters burnout. Naïve idealism magnifies one’s vulnerability to a burnout but it is not an essential prerequisite.

A persistent imbalance of demands over resources leads to increased burnout as an increase of demands leads to insufficient opportunities to regenerate depleted energy. There are also value conflicts between the employee and organization and this misfit can lead to increased burnout.

Globalization, privatization and liberalization cause rapid changes in modern working life. Burnout occurs globally. The meaning of the term burnout differs per country, however. The medicalization of burnout is intertwined with debates of whether burnout is not mere exhaustion. Most burnout research uses a definition that includes exhaustion (1), inefficacy (2) and cynicism (3) (i.e. multidimensional view). The one-dimensional view of burnout is that it is exhaustion (e.g. psychological exhaustion, emotional exhaustion).

The definition of burnout is sometimes treated as being context-independent, although this is not possible for the multi-dimensional approach of burnout research. The definition of burnout is also dependent on medical practice as medical practitioners favour dichotomous diagnoses. The dichotomy of burnout does not necessarily refer to an external criterion but are based on frequency distributions.

Burnout was first seen as a negative state of mind but it is now seen as an erosion of a positive state of mind. Nowadays, there is more a focus on fostering work engagement rather than preventing burnout.