Revisiting the stressor-burnout relationship: Evidence for reverse causation and conditional change

The assumption that work stressors cause burnout is central to many occupational health theories. In this study, we addressed three limitations in prior research: (a) the limited understanding of how within-person increases in work stressors drive increases in burnout (the stressor hypothesis), including the consideration of whether the reverse effect (the strain hypothesis) offers greater predictive value; (b) the limited research on varying long-term time lags in the development of burnout; and (c) the limited evaluation of the effects of multiple work stressors. We applied random-intercept cross-lagged panel models with different time lags to analyze data from 2,131 German-speaking employees, collected across five time points over 24 months. Our findings showed stronger support for the strain hypothesis, suggesting that an increase in burnout over 6 months results in a subsequent increase in work stressors. This finding remained consistent across three types of stressors (i.e., work overload, social stressors, and organizational stressors) and when accounting for additional longer term time lags. We found limited evidence for the stressor hypothesis, particularly when disregarding stable between-person differences. However, cross-level moderation analyses showed that work stressors resulted in increased burnout for individuals who experience chronically lower levels of job resources (i.e., job autonomy and social support) or higher levels of work stressors. Our findings challenge the unconditional applicability of the stressor effect. They emphasize the theoretical importance of considering reverse causation, the timing of effects, and a clearer distinction between within-person changes and between-person differences to advance the understanding of burnout development processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).