The timing of the snapshot is not guaranteed to be representative, as far as there are seasonal variations in professional activity all along the year.

Introduction

It is well admitted that the word ‘professional burnout’ refers to a psychological syndrome arising in response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job. It has been defined by its impact on three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalisation (DP) and reduced personal accomplishment (PA) (feelings of inefficacy).1 EE refers to the feeling of being overextended and depleted of one's emotional resources. DP is characterised by a negative, cynical and detached response to other people, including colleagues, patients or clients. A reduction in PA occurs when a person feels herself or himself less competent at work.1

Burnout at the workplace has been attributed to different factors, relative to organisational and individual factors. Regarding organisational factors workload, effort reward imbalance, work conflicts, diminished resources, job insecurity and continuing rapid organisational changes have been implicated.2 ,3 Burnout has been also described as failure to cope with occupational stress in occupations requiring intensive communication and interaction with service recipients.3 Moreover, high job strain for white-collar men (workers in ‘management, business and financial occupations’ and in ‘professional and related occupations’) has been recently evidenced to increase the risk of mortality.4

Originally, the burnout symptoms were only described in client-related occupations, but they actually resulted from all types of work.1 Most of the recent studies that estimate the prevalence of burnout focused on a specific occupational group, primarily for service-related professions such as teachers, correctional officers, hotel employees, residents or nurses.2 ,5–7 In addition, professional burnout appears to be highly prevalent among medical students and practising physicians with rates ranging from 25% to 60%.8 ,9 These professions are people oriented (interactions with students, patients, families, etc) and frequently exposed to night shifts. Embriaco et al9 have identified three factors related to night work in the occurrence of burnout: the number of night shifts per month, a longer period of time from the last non-working week, and the presence of one night shift before the day of the survey.

Increasing evidence, based on both questionnaire data and objective polysomnographic recordings, has underlined an association between the occurrence of a burnout syndrome and the presence of past sleep disorders, which may contribute to increased fatigue and impaired restoration.10 ,11 Previous studies have suggested that individuals with high burnout levels exhibit poorer sleep quality. Especially women scoring high on burnout report greater sleepiness, impaired sleep quality and more frequent awakenings than those scoring low.12 In addition, a persistent association between burnout and insomnia has been established.13 Findings of self-report studies on sleep are highly correlated with objective measures, such as polysomnography (PSG). A study using polysomnographic sleep measures in young individuals with high scores of burnout found more arousals and sleep fragmentation, more wake time and stage-1 sleep, lower sleep efficiency, less slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep, and a lower δ power density in non-rapid eye movement sleep in participants with burnout.11

In France, several studies had already focused on professional burnout specifically in caregivers. Embriaco et al9 found a high prevalence of burnout of 46.5% among intensivists, the burnout being related to organisational factors. Among French general practice trainees, it was found a percentage of trainees with high levels of EE at 16.0%, 33.8% had a high score for DP and 38.9% had a high score for low personal accomplishment, and a prevalence of severe burnout of 6.5%.14 Few French studies concerned other types of working populations such as teachers, but Vercambre et al15 showed that burnout is highly prevalent among teachers and broadly related to contextual covariates, and the same findings are highlighted in managers.

The aim of the present study is first to determine the prevalence of burnout in a specific group of financial workers, namely high level executive white-collar workers. The second objective was to examine whether job strain and sleep disturbances are potential risk factors (predictors) and/or outcomes of burnout.