Psychology, 2017, 8, 1019-1041 http://www.scirp.org/journal/psych ISSN Online: 2152-7199 ISSN Print: 2152-7180 DOI: 10.4236/psych.2017.87067 May 22, 2017 Only One Burnout Estimator Is Consistently Associated with Health Care Providers’ Perceptions of Job Demand and Resource Problems Jan Beckstrand, Nancy Yanchus * , Katerine Osatuke Health Administration National Center for Organizational Development, Cincinnati, OH, USA Abstract Five “high” burnout estimators are in common use. Each is based on a differ- ent subset of the three aspects of “Burnout Syndrome”, so each gives a differ- ent estimate of the “high” burnout prevalence in a population. Managers often don’t know these prevalences are incomparable. Managers also have little spe- cific information on how their institution’s burnout measure is associated with their employees’ perceptions of problems in job demands and resources in their work environment, as regularly queried in organizational health sur- veys. In the current study, we demonstrated the differences in the prevalences of “high” burnout obtained using each of five “high” burnout estimators. We also evaluated and compared the five burnout estimators’ associations with employee-perceived problems in each of 31 areas of job demands and re- sources in human-systems functioning. We measured these associations by how much more the aspects of burnout queried in the estimator were re- ported by those who perceived a problem than by those who did not (the pos- itive likelihood ratio, LR+). We examined five types of physicians (6599), nurse practitioners (2158) and physician assistants (786). We found that four of the “high” burnout estimators showed few associations with employee per- ceptions of problems in job demands or resources, but one estimator—the trivariate joint occurrence of “high” (i.e. frequent) emotional exhaustion, “high” depersonalization and “low” sense of personal accomplishment (meas- ured by well-validated single-item surrogates for the three Maslach Burnout Inventory subscales)—was clinically significantly associated with 97% (30) of the problems in job demands and resources studied, in at least one of the health provider groups. Our results challenge the current preference for “high” emotional exhaustion dominated “high” burnout estimators. How to cite this paper: Beckstrand, J., Yanchus, N., & Osatuke, K. (2017). Only One Burnout Estimator Is Consistently Associated with Health Care Providers’ Perceptions of Job Demand and Resource Problems. Psychology, 8, 1019-1041. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2017.87067 Received: March 6, 2017 Accepted: May 19, 2017 Published: May 22, 2017 Copyright © 2017 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access