Epigenetics, Changing Organizational Contexts, Personality Traits, Stress Regulation and Burnout: An Integrative Multi-Adaptive Biological-Mental-Social Network Analysis

This research addresses the interplay of changing social and organizational context factors with the big five personality traits and the three main characterizing elements of a burnout. A computational analysis is contributed based on an integrative biological-mental-social network modeling approach. The simulation results show how two people who are high in personality traits such as agreeableness, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and highly sensitive for neuroticism, are vulnerable to reach a burnout level in all dimensions whenever the organizational context is changing in a less favorable direction. By a What-If analysis it is analysed how important characteristics affect the outcomes and indicate how in a qualitative sense that is in line with empirical literature. Several differentiations are made. In particular, the connection between the three dimensions of a burnout shows that it is possible that one employee reaches a burnout state while the other does not. It is also shown how therapy alone may not be sufficient as a long-term treatment, but therapy of one employee does affect the other. As numerical data are not (yet) available, further numerical validation has been proposed for future work.