5. Conclusions
The current study suggests several general conclusions. First, it is possible to recognize burnout profiles from employees’ text comments. Given that employees were not asked specifically about burnout, but were invited to comment about general strengths and weaknesses of their workplace, this underscores the salience of burnout in defining the overall workplace experience. Second, basedsolely onthemes that summarizedthe content of open-ended comments, it may be impossible to categorize the commenters into burnout profiles (i.e. to distinguish the profiles from one another); the themes in the general comments show more the similarities than the differences among the burnout profiles. That is, from the standpoint of effectively summarizing distinct themes brought up by employee general comments on the organizational strengths and weaknesses, some of the statistically generated profiles are more informative than others; more specifically, based on our data, those that contrast the PA and DP dimensions seem to be the most informative ones. Overall, the study sheds light on how burnout is perceived and described by the Veterans Administration employees, based onexamining their ownsummary oftheir direct personal experience (i.e. words that employees used in their comments, rather than numeric ratings selected to rate the standard survey items). We suggest that incorporating this perspective – and our specific findings – into organizational actions to create conditions for engagement and/or prevent burnout constitutes useful steps toward improving the psychological well-being of the workforce.
