[5] Emotional exhaustion research has been guided by Christina Maslach's and Susan E. Jackson's three-component conceptualization of burnout.
[6] This model suggests burnout consists of three interrelated parts: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and diminished personal accomplishment.
Personal resources, such as status, social support, money, or shelter, may reduce or prevent an employee's emotional exhaustion.
[11][12][13][14] In a field study, those experiencing higher levels of job autonomy (the freedom to take initiative and exercise discretion in decision-making), low task complexity, supervisory support, and the internal locus of control (a tendency to attribute events to one's own control; such as the tendency to attribute a success to internal causes, like one's ability or effort, rather than external causes, such as good luck), tend to experience lower degrees of emotional exhaustion.
[16] Another field study, basing on a sample of call center workers in a large telecommunications corporation, indicate that employees who are highly identified with the service work, possess higher levels of self-efficacy (the belief in one's ability to succeed;[17]), and receive social support from their supervisors, are less likely to experience emotional exhaustion.
[18] In a study done with college students, burnout resulted from a lifestyle that required extremely high amounts of effort with low support systems in place to aid with stress coping.
[19] Researchers suggest that emotional exhaustion may be a result of using inadequate strategies in order to cope with problematic events on the job.
[16] Supervisors are likely to be important definers of interpersonal demands at the job level, given their direct influence on worker's beliefs about high-performance expectations.
The social interaction model suggests an alternate route by which to proceed with theory building and future research.
For example, Russell Cropanzano and his colleagues, in their two field studies, indicate that exhausted employees show lower organizational commitment, lower job performance, less organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) directed toward the organization (OCBO) and their supervisors (OCBS), and higher turnover intentions.
[33] Similarly, longitudinal studies found that exhausted employees show not only lower job performance, but also more absences, and greater likelihood of seeking employment elsewhere (actual voluntary turnover).