BAT-12 insights: Advancing burnout research

Burnout is a rising concern affecting workplaces worldwide. The African Journal of Psychological Assessment (AJOPA) presents an engaging discussion with two authors of the pivotal study Investigating the validity of the short form Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT-12): A job demands-resources approach. This research, conducted by Leon T. de Beer (North-West University, South Africa), Wilmar B. Schaufeli (Utrecht University, The Netherlands and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), and Arnold B. Bakker (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands), explores the BAT-12’s reliability in identifying burnout and its application within the Job Demands-Resources model.

Join AJOPA’s Editor-in-Chief, Tyrone Pretorius, as he speaks with these experts on burnout measurement and its critical role in fostering healthier work environments.

Prof De Beer, please give us a short account of your institutional affiliations over the years.
I was connected to the WorkWell Research Unit, North-West University from 2013 when I started as postdoc up until full professor and Research Director of the WorkWell Research Unit (2020-2023). I then moved to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in February 2023, where I am currently employed as an Associate Professor of Psychology in the programme for Work and Organizational Psychology. However, I remain connected to South Africa and the North-West University with an extraordinary full professorship.

What would you consider to be your major research focus and what is the role of your work on the psychometric analysis of instruments in this focus or is psychometric analysis your major research focus?
My major research focus is employee well-being and distress at work. This has manifested in work mainly on the measurement of burnout and work engagement. My work is supported by a strong psychometric foundation to ensure validity and equivalence of measures, especially given the history of the use of instruments in South Africa’s history. I remain committed to these principles also in Norway. I believe there are many techniques that remain under utilised in psychometric papers, especially exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM) — which can solve a lot of problems researchers face. Such as inflated correlations, underlying global and specific factors etc.

About the featured article, apart from what is mentioned in the article itself are there any other factors that led you to focus on this particular measure of burnout?
Burnout is a complex phenomenon, and has been criticised harshly over the last decade. For example, there are many instruments that measure burnout and therefore varying definitions. However, as part of the International Burnout Assessment Tool consortium that spans more than 30 countries, approaching burnout in both an inductive and deductive way. The goal of the consortium is to establish a more accurate measure of burnout which includes important aspects such as cognitive and emotional impairment, in addition to the known features of exhaustion and mental distance.

Did you have to make any adaptations to the Burnout Assessment Tool for cultural, linguistic or contextual relevance?
The BAT-12 has shown invariance across samples, including South Africa. However, only the English version has been validated and opportunities remain to validate African language versions against the English. This will reveal if any adjustments are required.

For those that have not read your paper, can you summarise the practical implications of your findings for academics, researchers, and psychologists?
The BAT-12 reliably gauges burnout risk in both individuals and work groups, also making it useful for psychosocial risk assessments and for modelling health‐impairment processes within the JD-R framework. It does not diagnose burnout; elevated scores merely flag risk and should trigger referral to employee assistance services or a qualified health professional for clinical evaluation.
Individuals can measure their own burnout risk for free against the data from the article at the following link: https://theburnout.app?mod=bat12sa
Users of the app are encouraged to focus on the global burnout score for their overall burnout risk. Importantly, an elevated burnout risk does not indicate any clinical problem.

Sorry to put you on the spot, but if you had to persuade someone to read the article, what would you say to that person?
Well, the article is very technical, but it also provides important information on the current state of burnout. It also contains a link to an app to measure your own burnout levels.

Prof Schaufeli, you are a highly regarded organizational/work psychologist having written and published with such noticeable figures as Christina Maslach of burnout fame. How did your South African connection come about?
Back in 2001 prof. Ian Rothman visited me at Utrecht University, where at that time I was the Director of the inter-university graduate school “Psychology & Health”. At that occasion he invited me to Potchefstroom for a conference on burnout next year (2002). From that time on a research collaboration existed with his research group on job burnout and work engagement. I visited Potchefstroom many times, in 2003, 2004, 2006 and in 2004 I received the Work Wellness Award from North West University, Potchefstroom: “… in recognition of the scientific contributions to the development of the field of Work Wellness in South Africa”. After prof. Rothman moved to Vanderbijlpark, I visited SA twice to Bloemfontein (2011) and again to Potchfestroom, this time hosted by Leon de Beer, who is currently working at the University of Trondheim (Norway) and with whom I build a very fruitful research collaboration about (the measurement of) burnout and work engagement.

What would you consider to be your major research focus?
Occupational health psychology: more particularly burnout, work engagement, workaholism, boredom, job satisfaction, sickness, absence, leadership, psychosocial risk factors, job demands and job resources (including the JD-R model).

I understand that you are the author of the instrument, the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT), that is the focus of this feature article. What were the motivations for developing the BAT?
The current ‘Gold standard” to assess burnout – the Maslach Burnout Inventory (to which I also contributed myself, by the way) has several flaws and is outdated. For more details see: https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/595.pdf and https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/608.pdf. For instance, the MBI does not yield one biurnout score, but three scores on each of its three dimensions. Also, no proper norms or validated cut-off scores are available grom the MBI. As a result, the MBI is not used very much by practitioner. Hence a new burnout instrument is needed. Meanwhile, three versions of the BAT are available: the original BAT-23 (for individual clinical assessment), the short BAT-12 (for identification of workers at risk) and the ultra-short BAT-4 (for epidemiological studies).

The paper reporting on the psychometric properties of the BAT was published in 2020. What does the available evidence say about the use of the BAT in other contexts? Has any systematic reviews and meta-analysis been undertaken?
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘other contexts’; you mean domains outside of work? The current evidence suggests that the BAT is a psychometrically sound instrument (e.g., it has a bifacor stucture that allows the computation of one composite score as well as subscale score, the Rasch model applies to the BAT, the BAT shows cross-cultural validity), clinically validated cut-off scores are available, just as statistical norms that are based on national representative samples, the BAT can be integrated on the JD-R model, which attests its content validity. See for more details: www.burnoutassessmenttool.be and www.wilmarschaufeli.nl.
Recently, a meta-analysis about the reliability of the BAT was published: https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/619.pdf. For a multiple-country study see: https://www.wilmarschaufeli.nl/publications/Schaufeli/608.pdf

You are at the pinnacle of your career with an astonishing H-index of 213. What advice would you offer to early career researchers working in organisational psychology or psychological assessment?

• Chase your dreams and work hard (but do not forget to unwind).
• Be generous and share; others will reciprocate and by the end of the day you receive more that when you keep everything for yourself.
• Build and invest in your network; it’s not only fun and enriching but also facilitates the acceptation and implementation of your work.
• Step outside the academic ivory tower; there is so much to learn and to be inspired from outside the walls of the university.

The interview highlighted the BAT-12’s value as a dependable tool for assessing burnout risk and its integration into the Job Demands-Resources model, showcasing its practical importance in promoting workplace well-being. The authors’ contributions bridge research and application, equipping organisations with actionable insights to address burnout effectively.

If you’re conducting impactful psychological research, we invite you to share your work with a wider academic audience by submitting to the African Journal of Psychological Assessment (AJOPA). Join us in advancing the field of psychological assessment.