Teacher burnout in Hong Kong and Germany: A cross-cultural validation of the maslach burnout inventory

Abstract

Teacher burnout is a world-wide phenomenon that draws the attention of educational psychologists and stimulates efforts in construct elaboration and measurement. Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (cynicism), and lack of personal accomplishments are three dimensions that constitute the burnout syndrome. Levels of this burnout syndrome were compared among 542 German and Chinese teachers. It turned out that there were only minor differences between the Germans and the Chinese, but major differences between those two groups and the U.S. American normative data. Moreover, stress resource factors were measured, namely perceived self-efficacy and proactive attitude. Their negative intercorrelations with burnout supported the validity of the burnout measure, although the associations were much closer in the German subsample. An attempt to replicate the American three-factorial structure of the burnout construct failed in both subsamples, which is in line with previous evidence and calls for a revision of the original measure.