sustainability Article COVID-19 Concerns and Personality of Commerce Workers: Its Influence on Burnout Ana María Rodríguez-López and Susana Rubio-Valdehita *   Citation: Rodríguez-López, A.M.; Rubio-Valdehita, S. COVID-19 Concerns and Personality of Commerce Workers: Its Influence on Burnout. Sustainability 2021, 13, 12908. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212908 Academic Editor: Natalio Extremera Received: 2 November 2021 Accepted: 18 November 2021 Published: 22 November 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Faculty of Psychology, Complutense University of Madrid, 20223 Madrid, Spain; anrodr17@ucm.es * Correspondence: srubiova@ucm.es Abstract: We analyze burnout in a sample of commercial workers in Spain and its relationship with sociodemographic variables, personality, and concern about the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on their jobs through a cross-sectional design. Participants (n = 614) answered an online survey, including questions about sociodemographic data, concern, NEO-FFI (personality), and MBI (burnout syndrome). The survey took place from October 2020 to May 2021. We assessed the relationships between sociodemographic variables, pandemic concern, and personality as predictors of burnout by hierarchical regression analysis and then tested using SEM (structural equation models). The proposed model showed adequate goodness-of-fit indices. The results of the present study suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic had little effect to the development of burnout syndrome in commerce employees. However, in agreement with previous literature, the present study shows that personality has a significant role in predicting burnout. Neuroticism, introversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were strong predictors for burnout dimensions. In addition, we found that personality directly affected the pandemic concern: individuals with high levels of Neuroticism and low levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness have more pandemic concerns. In conclusion, personality is an important factor that affects the level of workers’ concern about the influence of the pandemic on their job and the development of burnout syndrome. Furthermore, although we found significant differences between groups formed by various sociodemographic characteristics, the conclusion regarding this type of variable is that their ability to predict burnout is deficient. Keywords: burnout; personality; COVID-19; pandemic; commerce sector; Spain 1. Introduction COVID-19 emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan (Hubei, China), and on 11 March 2020, the WHO (World Health Organization) recognized it as a global pandemic [1]. In Spain, authorities identified the first local contagion on 26 February 2020, and since then, the emergence of the pandemic has seriously impacted the Spanish economy and labor market [2]. According to the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Tourism, the commerce sector constitutes one of the most valuable sectors of the Spanish economy [3]: it accounts for 12.6% of the total gross added value (GVA) of the Spanish economy, and retail trade alone accounts for 5.2% of the total GVA. Since the establishment of the state of alarm in March 2020, the restrictions adopted by the Spanish government and the governments of each autonomous community to fight COVID-19 have had a severe impact on all commercial activities. Consequently, the destruction of employment and an inevitable drop in the average income of consumers led to a contraction of domestic demand. Most commercial companies have faced a situation of reduced income for more than a year, which puts their permanence in the market at risk and has led to essential changes in the conditions of hundreds of thousands of jobs [4–6]. The delicate and complex situation faced by the commerce sector and its impact on its workers has led to tightening working conditions, translating into an increase in occupational diseases such as burnout [7–11]. Thus, the uncertainty caused by the Sustainability 2021, 13, 12908. https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212908 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability