Stress, burnout and engagement transmit between people who work or live closely, so states are not individually contained.
Studies of couples and of work teams find partner and colleague strain predicting an individual's own strain after controlling for shared conditions. Proposed routes include empathy, direct transmission through interaction, and shared stressors that are hard to rule out. The practical implication is that burnout in a team is not a sum of individual cases.
In practice
- A team where one member is exhausted becomes an exhausted team within a quarter.
- A manager under pressure produces reports under pressure, without any of the pressure being transferred deliberately.
- Standing
- Distinct from spillover, which is transmission between domains within one person; crossover is between people.
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- What gets in the way of good work