The role of extraversion in the Great Resignation: A burnout-quitting process during the pandemic
Introduction
During the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses experienced unprecedented levels of employee quitting- a global phenomenon that has been termed the Great Resignation (Klotz, 2021). To illustrate, the U.S. turnover rate reached a 20-year high in November 2021, and more than 47 million employees left their workplaces (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021). There are a variety of reasons for this phenomenon, such as evolving working norms, lower income, and industry types (e.g., especially for health care workers; Jiskrova, 2022). One of the main reasons believed to underlie the Great Resignation is prolonged distress, or burnout (e.g., Mayer, 2021). Burnout refers to a state of being depleted of physical and emotional energy and reflects a chronic stress syndrome (Schaufeli et al., 1996).
Various pandemic-related effects may have increased burnout. For one, because of social distancing policies due to the pandemic (e.g., telework), some employees experienced loneliness and less segmentation between the workplace and home, contributing to increased burnout (e.g., Gubler et al., 2021; Vaziri et al., 2020). Some employees experienced increased job demands (e.g., healthcare workers; Jiskrova, 2022). Indeed, according to a recent survey, almost half of 2800 employees reported they are more burned out than before the pandemic, and 40% of 1000 full-time employees who quit their job recently indicated that the main reason for their quitting is burnout (Mayer, 2021). Given that the pandemic directly threatens physical wellness and increases mortality salience, employees experiencing high burnout levels may be motivated to protect themselves by leaving their job (Klotz, 2021).
Although burnout is presumed to act as a key factor contributing to the “Great Resignation” (e.g., Mayer, 2021; Parker & Clark, 2022; Sheather & Slattery, 2021), there remain questions about individual differences that contribute to burnout and turnover during pandemic situations. This gap is important because, unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the COVID-19 pandemic will be an isolated event. Instead, there are very likely to be future pandemics requiring social distancing (e.g., Gill et al., 2020) and disrupting the global economy (Tandon, 2020). Thus, in order to learn from this pandemic and prepare for future events, we investigate differences in how employees fared regarding their levels of burnout and voluntary turnover.
Trait theories, which informed the development of the big five factor model (e.g., Goldberg, 1992), state that broad and stable characteristics (i.e., personality) of people affect their psychological differences (DeYoung, 2017). We define personality as “average tendencies in behavior over time,” (DeYoung, 2017, p. 14), which is consistent with typical big five factor personality measurement (e.g., Fleeson & Gallagher, 2009). Personality may be appropriate when predicting employee outcomes during pandemic situations. In fact, certain employee personality traits and burnout predict employee exit (e.g., Rubenstein et al., 2018; Swider & Zimmerman, 2010; Zimmerman, 2008). For instance, a meta-analytic path analysis demonstrated that, aside from extraversion, the remaining four Big Five personality factors relate to turnover, via sub-facets of burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment; Swider & Zimmerman, 2010). In other words, compared to the other four personality traits, extraversion had the weakest association with turnover, consistent with previous research (e.g., Zimmerman, 2008). This is surprising because extraversion is expected to be negatively associated with burnout via higher positive affect, but ambition-related subcomponents of extraversion likely led to more job search behavior (Zimmerman et al., 2016).
In this study, we focus on extraversion because employees were subjected to social distancing, telework, and isolation during the pandemic, such that traits relevant to social functioning may be particularly important when explaining the Great Resignation. In fact, although it seemed that introverted people would be better suited for the isolation and social distancing required by the pandemic, research indicates that introversion instead predicted increased loneliness, anxiety, and depression as a result of the pandemic (Gubler et al., 2021). Extraversion,1 therefore, is especially relevant to burnout and turnover during social isolation and we focus our efforts on this. Specifically, extraverted employees may be better able to manage the social isolation within the pandemic, in that they have greater networking comfort and network size (e.g., Wanberg et al., 2000). Additionally, during the pandemic, higher levels of extraversion were associated with more problem-focused coping, less loneliness, better emotional status, and higher subjective wellness (e.g., Agbaria & Mokh, 2022; Gubler et al., 2021; Langvik et al., 2021). Thus, extraversion should manifest in the life outcome of decreased burnout in the pandemic situation. Hypothesis 1 Extraversion is associated with decreased burnout.
Additionally, extraverted employees may negotiate changes to the environment more readily. That is, the behavioral trends that comprise extraversion are associated with active engagement, such as problem-focused coping. For example, meta-analytic evidence shows a correlation of 0.19 between extraversion and job crafting (Rudolph et al., 2017). On the other hand, introverted people are expected to be more bound by social expectations through conditioning, thus more “socialized” and unlikely to defy convention (e.g., Eysenck, 1979). In these situations, introverted people are motivated to remove themselves from an unpleasant situation, rather than take steps to change it (e.g., Baer et al., 2016; Eysenck, 1967). Thus, we expect that extraversion is associated with less burnout during the pandemic circumstance and in turn, less voluntary turnover (see Fig. 1). Hypothesis 2 Extraverted employees experience less burnout than introverted employees, which in turn negatively relates to employee quitting.
Section snippets
Study 1 data and sample
Participants were full-time workers in US from diverse industries (e.g., health care, manufacturing) recruited using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowd-sourcing platform. MTurk has been adopted more than 18 years, and accumulated research has demonstrated that MTurk participants are representative of US employees and provide reliable data (Kim & Beehr, 2020). In fact, empirical research shows that online panel data is of equal or higher psychometric quality than organizational
Study 2
To provide context for the Study 1 mediation, we probed data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (June 2020). Specifically, to identify a potential contextual factor during the pandemic situation, we analyzed role overload during the pandemic as a moderator of the relationship between extraversion and burnout. Role overload, in general, occurs when an employee has multiple roles simultaneously and lack of resource to address these roles (Beehr et al., 1976). During the COVID-19 pandemic,
General discussion
In order to learn from this pandemic and prepare for future crises, we investigate how differences in employee extraversion affects burnout and voluntary turnover during the Great Resignation. Specifically, we found that extraversion was associated with less burnout and, in turn, less turnover. Moreover, it seems that extraversion mitigated the effects of role overload on burnout during the pandemic. Perhaps extraverted employees were better able to adapt to social changes in their
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Young-Kook Moon (Central Michigan University), Kimberly E. O'Brien (Central Michigan University) were responsible for the conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, and writing tasks including composing the original draft as well as editing and reviews of subsequent manuscript drafts. Kyle J. Mann (Central Michigan University) contributed data collection, formal analysis, and investigation.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Acknowledgments
This was partially funded by a grant from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at Central Michigan University.
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