Relationship between Personality Traits and Psychological Components with Job Burnout among Dentists: A descriptive-correlational study

Job burnout is a psychological syndrome involving the three axes of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment, and it occurs when a person in the workplace is subjected to prolonged stress with severe psychological and physical consequences (2). Burnout will lead to a low quality of work, customer or clients’ dissatisfaction, psychological consequences such as depression, and even physical illnesses. Since job burnout is a disabling condition that decreases the quality of services in workplaces, it is necessary to identify the underlying psychosocial risk factors involved in this condition. A growing body of literature has documented that various psychosocial risk factors can cause burnout including job motivation, lack of adequate support from managers, high workload and stress, and psychological or physical disorders (6). High workload and stressful work environment considered as important factors that contributed to the job burnout, but all people working at a stressful work environment dos not suffer from job burnout (15). It seems that some personal risk factors make people susceptible to job burnout. Psychological and personality factors considered as important personal risk factors that may play a decisive role in the development or maintenance of job burnout (17). Job burnout is one of the most disabling conditions that threaten the mental and physical health of workers in medical settings. While job burnout has been studies in different medical settings (3) there is a dearth of research in the dentistry settings and further research is needed. Dentists are one of the medical groups that are at high risk of burnout due to different environmental risk factors causing stress at work (5). Limited studies have been done on the role of psychological and personality factors involved in job burnout among dentists. This study aimed to explore the relationship between pathological personality traits and psychological distress (depression, anxiety and stress) with job burnout among dentists.

The method of this research was a descriptive-correlational study. The statistical population included all general and specialist dentists working in public clinics and private offices. Using a convenience sampling method study questionnaires were distributed electronically among channels and groups of dentists. Inclusion criteria include having work experience more than 2 years in the dentistry settings, current employment, being between 31 to 70 years old, not having a history of severe psychiatric illness and willingness to participate in research. The tools used in this study included the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) and Depression, Anxiety and Stress-21 (DASS-21). After distributing the questionnaires, 758 completed questionnaires were received from the participants, of which 641 valid questionnaires were separated for analysis and the rest that were incompletely or uniformly completed were discarded. In order to analyze the data of the present study, descriptive indices, t-test, and Pearson’s correlation was used. All statistical analyses were conducted using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for Windows, Version 22.

The results showed that pathological personality traits and psychological components, as well as demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, marital status) and job-related variables (such as working hours, work history), affect job burnout in dentists. In terms of job burnout dimensions, in terms of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment, 0.5%, 7.8%, and 21.8% of respondents were in a high burnout state, respectively. There was a significant relationship between all three dimensions of job burnout and gender, and emotional exhaustion was more in men than women, and depersonalization and lack of personal success were more in women than men. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between all three dimensions of job burnout and marital status, so that emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were more in single people than in married people, and the lack of personal success was more in married people than in single people. There was a significant relationship between emotional exhaustion and education level, and it was more common among general dentists than specialist. There was a significant and direct correlation between the job burnout dimensions of working hours per week and the lack of personal success. Depersonalization was also higher in people with more than 40 hours of work per week. There was a significant and inverse correlation between work experience and depersonalization, and the intensity of the correlation was also weak.

In general, in addition to demographic variables (age, gender, marital status) and job-related variables (education and working hours), personality traits and mood states such as depression, anxiety and stress can explain job burnout among dentists. How job burnout can affect the five areas of personality is due to the fact that work is one of the issues that humans deal with on a daily basis and the tensions and pressures that cause job burnout can chronically affect the psychological structure of a person and affect the five areas of personality. On the other hand, personality traits affect the type of facing problems, pressures and tensions from the work environment. The results can have theoretical and practical implications in providing appropriate psychological interventions for dentists suffering from job burnout. At the theoretical level, the results of this research can help to better understand personal factors that aggravate and maintain burnout among dentists. At the practical level, the results can have practical implications in providing suitable psychological interventions for dentists suffering from job burnout. These results provide further support for the development of new treatments that target individual factors in burnout and teach skills to help develop individual skills. Nevertheless, the findings must be interpreted in the context of its limitations. The cross-sectional nature of our study impedes any inferences about causality or temporality of associations among the variables investigated. Therefore, longitudinal experimental studies are encouraged to explore whether the associations reported here actually resemble predictions and mediations in prospective designs in which causal relationships and temporal ordering of variables can be statistically detected. Only self-report measures were used in this research, which could introduce biases such as social desirability. Conducting experimental studies with more objective measurement tools on dentists with job burnout can be beneficial for finding better results. Despite these limitations present findings can pave the way for the future research and updated critical literature. This study adds to the growing literature on the field and remediate the dearth of studies in this area.