Ubiquitous emotional exhaustion in school principals : Stable trait, enduring autoregressive trend, or occasion-specific state?

Principal strain and burnout is a major issue in desperate need of further investigation and solutions. Deepening our understanding of emotional exhaustion, the central dimension of burnout, would greatly further this pursuit. Using a large, longitudinal, representative sample of Australian school principals, the present study decomposed emotional exhaustion into occasion-specific state, enduring autoregressive, and stable trait components using the STARTS (stable trait, autoregressive trait, and state) model. The results showed evidence for variance in all three components, indicating that principals’ emotional exhaustion is approximately evenly split between the enduring autoregressive component and stable trait component, with slightly less variance being observed for the occasion-specific state. Heterogeneity in this profile was mainly associated with individual characteristics of the principals themselves (i.e., experience and gender) rather than characteristics of the job (school sector and level). The results revealed that less experienced and male principals have more malleable (enduring autoregressive and state-like) emotional exhaustion, while more experienced and female principals have more trait-like emotional exhaustion. This emphasizes a likely development of emotional exhaustion from acute to chronic under persistent exposure to burnout-inducing situations, with additional evidence for a possible dispositional tendency toward emotional exhaustion. Thus, measures to tackle emotional exhaustion need to be based on the type of emotional exhaustion the principal is experiencing and ideally include elements that target both the situational/contextual and the individual factors that cause emotional exhaustion in school principals.