Exploring Personality Types and Burnout among School Teachers: A Study in Rasht, Iran

The present study investigated the relationship between John Holland’s personality types (realist, investigative, conventional) with burnout among female and male teachers at first duration of high school (guidance school) and second duration of high school (secondary school). Burnout is emotional exhaustion which is a result of continuous reaction task to chronic emotion- al and interpersonal stress triggers that are defined by the help of three aspects, emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and lack of success (sense of incompetence). For this purpose, 327 persons were selected by multistage cluster sampling method. In order to gather information, Meshach burnout questionnaire and John Holland’s job-personality questionnaire were used. This research is a kind of correlation that in this method, personality traits and (dependent) criterion variable of burnout will be predicted from (independent) predictor variable and method of gathering information is field type. Descriptive and inferential statistic methods were utilized to analyze the data. It was worth mentioning that Pearson correlation coefficient r, linear regression and the analysis of multivariable variance (MANOVA) were used to measure the relationship between predictor and criterion variables. Obtained results by the investigation of relations showed that there was a reversed relationship between personality types and the degree of burnout, with correlation coefficient of r = (–2.24), respectively, in the level of (p = 0/01). The relationship between realist, investigative and conventional personality types with burnout which was calculated by (r = –1.15, r = –1.84, r = –2.19) respectively, was significant and reversed. It was necessary to say that among demographic variables (gender, age, precedent, education and teacher’s marital status) there was just a significant relationship between gender, personality type and the degree of burnout in the level of (p = 0/05). It showed that from the view point of gender there was a significant difference between burnout. The degree of burnout in male teachers was more than female, and there were no significant differences in other demographic variables. The most important application of this study is that everybody will be employed according to his/her job-personality type to avoid any physical and mental damages arising from working. This study has determined that people who scored high in the personality constructs of extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness tend to have higher levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. In addition, individuals who scored high on the personality construct of neuroticism were shown to have a positive correlation with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.