Emotional exhaustion
Emotional exhaustion is the first dimension of burnout in the Maslach framework: the chronic depletion of emotional and physical resources from sustained work demand. It is typically the dimension that develops first in the burnout syndrome — exhaustion precedes the cynical detachment of depersonalization, which precedes the loss of personal accomplishment.
The Maslach Burnout Inventory measures emotional exhaustion with items like 'I feel emotionally drained from my work' and 'I feel used up at the end of the workday' on a 7-point frequency scale. Empirically, emotional exhaustion is the dimension most responsive to short-term intervention (reduced workload, time off) — depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment are slower to recover. The implication for engineering organisations: a team showing rising emotional-exhaustion scores is in the early stage of burnout where reversal is still cheap; by the time depersonalization scores rise, the team has typically lost members and the reversal is much more expensive.
Related terms
- Maslach Burnout Inventory
The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the most-cited clinical instrument for measuring occupational burnout.
- Depersonalization
Depersonalization, also called cynicism or callousness, is the second dimension of burnout in the Maslach framework: a defensive emotional detachment from the work and the people the work serves.
- Process debt
Process debt is the accumulated friction from team processes that no longer fit the work they govern — sprint structures that produce overcommitment, retrospectives that surface action items without follow-through, on-call rotations that never get re-tuned, estimation rituals that produce false confidence.