Hope collection

How can understanding the different types of emotional exhaustion in school principals help tailor effective support and intervention strategies?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

• Tailor support to experience level:
  Provide mentoring and early intervention for new principals to prevent acute emotional exhaustion from becoming chronic and trait-like over time.

• Recognise gender differences in burnout:
  Female principals may need more sustained support due to higher trait-like exhaustion; consider gender-sensitive wellbeing strategies and resource allocation.

• Use multi-level interventions:
  Combine short-term stress relief with long-term resilience-building to address all components of emotional exhaustion—state, enduring, and trait.

• Monitor burnout progression:
  Regularly assess emotional exhaustion to detect shifts from situational stress to chronic burnout, enabling timely and appropriate intervention.

• Focus on individual over institutional factors:
  Since personal traits and experience drive exhaustion more than school type or level, prioritise personalised wellbeing plans over one-size-fits-all programs.

Abstract

Principal strain and burnout is a major issue in desperate need of further investigation and solutions. Deepening our understanding of emotional exhaustion, the central dimension of burnout, would greatly further this pursuit. Using a large, longitudinal, representative sample of Australian school principals, the present study decomposed emotional exhaustion into occasion specific state, enduring autoregressive, and stable trait components using the STARTS (Stable Trait, Auto Regressive Trait, and State) model. The results showed evidence for variance in all three components, indicating that principals’ emotional exhaustion is approximately evenly split between the enduring autoregressive component and stable trait component, with slightly less variance being observed for the occasion specific state. Heterogeneity in this profile was mainly associated with individual characteristics of the principals themselves (i.e., experience and gender) rather than characteristics of the job (school sector and level). The results revealed that less experienced and male principals have more malleable (enduring autoregressive and state-like) emotional exhaustion while more experienced and female principals have more trait-like emotional exhaustion. This emphasises a likely development of emotional exhaustion from acute to chronic under persistent exposure to burnout-inducing situations, with additional evidence for a possible dispositional tendency towards emotional exhaustion. Thus, measures to tackle emotional exhaustion need to be based on the type of emotional exhaustion the principal is experiencing and ideally include elements that target both the situational/contextual and the individual factors that cause emotional exhaustion in school principals.

Full paper access

Dicke, Theresa, Parker, Philip D., Guo, Jiesi, Basarkod, Geetanjali, Marsh, Herbert W., Deady, Mark, Harvey, Samuel and Riley, Philip. (2022). Ubiquitous emotional exhaustion in school principals : Stable trait, enduring autoregressive trend, or occasion-specific state? Journal of Educational Psychology. 114(2), pp. 426-441.

Contact the researcher

Professor Theresa Dicke
Theresa.Dicke@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Professor Theresa Dicke’s research