Focusing the research agenda on burnout in IT: social representations of burnout in the profession

Despite the pervasiveness and high costs of burnout in IT, our understanding of this problem remains limited. Review of IS research on job stress/burnout reveals that this body of work has relied heavily on general OB theory (parsimonious models generalizable across a variety of occupations and social contexts). More recently, scholars have argued for the addition of an occupation-specific approach to complement general OB theory, incorporating factors and concerns particular to a profession/work environment to increase explanatory power and relevance. The purpose of the exploratory study in this paper is to provide a foundation for such an occupation-specific research agenda on burnout in the IT profession. As an initial step, we employ social representations theory and methods to understand how IT professionals today make sense of and assign meaning to burnout in the context of their work. Transcripts from in-depth interviews of 20 IT professionals were content-analyzed and 22 key topics (concepts) were identified. Quantitative methods, including analysis of similarity, were used to create a social representations ‘map’ reflecting these professionals' views of burnout. The study contributes to the development of a renewed research agenda by pinpointing highly salient issues and specific work contexts warranting priority in future investigations.