# Maslach's Six Factors ## The Idea in Brief Burnout isn't just exhaustion. It's exhaustion plus cynicism plus inefficacy—and it comes from chronic stress that accumulates around six specific factors in your work environment. Knowing the six factors turns a vague feeling into a diagnostic you can act on. --- ## The Three Dimensions of Burnout Burnout has three components, and you need all three to be fully burned out: **Exhaustion** — no energy to do good work. This is the one everyone recognises. **Cynicism** — negative attitudes toward your work and disassociation from projects and people. You stop caring, or actively resent what you're doing. **Inefficacy** — feeling like you're accomplishing significantly less than usual. The work doesn't seem to matter, or you can't muster the focus to do it well. Experiencing any one dimension is a warning sign. All three together is burnout. --- ## The Six Sources of Chronic Stress Chronic stress at work tends to accumulate around six factors. Each is a potential lever—something you can assess and, sometimes, change. **Workload** — how sustainable the amount of work on your plate actually is. Not "are you busy" but "does your capacity match your load over time?" **Values** — whether your work connects to something you care about. Misalignment here drains meaning. Alignment generates engagement that buffers against stress. **Reward** — both financial (salary, bonuses) and social (recognition for contributions). Insufficient reward feeds the inefficacy dimension directly. **Control** — autonomy over when, where, and how you work. Low control correlates strongly with burnout regardless of workload. **Fairness** — feeling treated equitably relative to colleagues. Unfairness breeds cynicism faster than almost anything else. **Community** — the quality of professional relationships. Weak relationships and unresolved conflict compound every other stressor. --- ## Implications **For self-diagnosis:** Score each factor 0-10 for current stress level. The total matters less than which factors score highest—those are your intervention points. **For managers:** You can't fix burnout by telling people to be more resilient. You fix it by changing the system: adjusting workload, increasing autonomy, improving recognition, resolving conflicts. The six factors tell you where to look. **For job decisions:** A role might score well on some factors and terribly on others. Fairness and control problems are often structural and hard to change. Values misalignment compounds over time. Workload spikes may be temporary. --- ## Sources - Christina Maslach, *The Burnout Challenge* — the research source for this framework - [[The Truth About Employee Engagement]] — Lencioni's three signs of a miserable job (anonymity, irrelevance, immeasurement) overlap with values, reward, and community - [[Herzbergs Two-Factor Theory]] — hygiene factors and motivators map partially onto Maslach's six factors - [[Nine Lies About Work]] — team context shapes control, fairness, and community more than company-level policies