When Calling Becomes Costly: Burnout, Moral Injury, and the Future of Sustainable Work
By Dr Jennifer Spencer.
Burnout has become a defining workforce challenge in service and care professions. Despite decades of research and wellness initiatives, rates remain high in healthcare, education, counseling, nonprofit leadership, and related fields, raising questions about whether current approaches address root causes rather than symptoms.
Increasingly, burnout is understood not only as an individual condition but also as a systems-level issue shaped by organizational design, leadership, and workplace culture. Alongside burnout research, scholars are also examining moral injury, which occurs when professionals cannot act in alignment with their values due to systemic constraints, while research on calling and meaningful work suggests that purpose-driven employees may be both more resilient and more vulnerable to burnout when conditions are unsustainable, with important implications for leadership and workforce sustainability.
The Historical Evolution of Burnout and Calling
The concept of calling has evolved from a primarily religious idea rooted in duty and service to others into a broader modern understanding tied to personal identity, purpose, and self-worth, particularly in Western industrial and post-industrial contexts where work is closely linked to wellbeing and identity.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emotional exhaustion in helping professions such as medicine, education, clergy, and social reform was often described as nervous exhaustion or neurasthenia, reflecting early recognition of the emotional burden inherent in caregiving roles. Modern burnout theory, developed by Herbert Freudenberger and later operationalized by Christina Maslach through the dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, provided a foundational framework for understanding occupational stress in human service work.
More recently, scholars have distinguished burnout from moral injury, with burnout reflecting exhaustion and overload and moral injury reflecting ethical distress caused by systemic barriers that prevent professionals from acting in alignment with their values, a distinction especially relevant in roles shaped by service, advocacy, and constrained decision-making.
Calling as Both Protective and Risk-Enhancing
Research grounded in Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and Frederick Herzberg’s motivation hygiene theory shows that workplace conditions, autonomy, and support play a central role in professional wellbeing, reinforcing that motivation is shaped by both internal and organizational factors. Studies consistently find that meaningful work and calling are linked to higher engagement, persistence, and resilience, with purpose often serving as a protective factor during stress.
However, strong callings can also increase risk by encouraging overcommitment, blurred boundaries, and tolerance of unhealthy conditions, particularly in helping professions. This creates a paradox in which purpose enhances engagement but may also lead organizations to rely on employee dedication to offset structural deficiencies such as understaffing and excessive workload, ultimately shifting systemic burdens onto individuals.
Burnout as a Systems Level Issue
Burnout research has shifted from viewing burnout as an individual stress management issue toward a systems-level problem, as resilience training and self-care initiatives alone show limited impact when organizational conditions remain unchanged.
Research consistently identifies key predictors such as:
- Excessive workload
- Low autonomy
- Role ambiguity
- Limited psychological safety
- Weak leadership support
- Ethical conflict
- Constrained control over work conditions
All of which suggest burnout is often a predictable response to chronic organizational strain.
Maslach and Leiter further emphasize that burnout emerges from mismatches between individuals and workplace domains such as workload, values, fairness, control, reward, and community, requiring structural and cultural change rather than individual coping alone. Expanding this view, moral injury highlights the ethical dimension of distress when professionals cannot act in alignment with their values due to systemic barriers, while scholars also note that individual differences and external stressors still shape how burnout is experienced, underscoring a complex interaction between person and environment.
International Perspectives on Sustainable Work
Different societies approach burnout and wellbeing in distinct ways that highlight contrasting assumptions about work and responsibility. Denmark’s arbejdsglæde emphasizes happiness, trust, and autonomy, while Finland prioritizes professional trust and reduced bureaucracy to support sustainable performance. The Netherlands treats burnout as an occupational health issue requiring structured reintegration and shared employer responsibility, reflecting a systemic recovery model. In Japan, karōshi, or death by overwork, has driven reforms targeting excessive overtime, though cultural pressures remain. By contrast, the United States often emphasizes individual resilience through wellness and mindfulness initiatives, which critics argue can shift responsibility away from organizational structures. These differences underscore how cultural values shape whether burnout is treated as an individual or systemic issue.
Implications for Business Psychology
Business Psychology bridges organizational performance and human sustainability, particularly as workforce shortages, disengagement, and retention challenges intensify across industries. This requires moving beyond framing burnout as a resilience deficit and toward addressing systemic drivers embedded in work design and leadership. Research grounded in self-efficacy theory, motivational psychology, and organizational wellbeing shows that sustainable performance depends on environments that support autonomy, psychological safety, ethical alignment, and meaningful contribution, not just individual effort.
For those who experience work as a calling, these conditions are especially important, as purpose can drive engagement but also heighten vulnerability to overcommitment and moral injury when supports are lacking. Sustainable work will therefore depend less on helping employees endure strain and more on redesigning systems that protect both performance and wellbeing.
Conclusion
Burnout and moral injury reflect more than individual stress responses. They signal deeper structural misalignments between workers, their values, and the environments in which they operate.
While calling and meaningful work can enhance motivation and resilience, they can also intensify vulnerability when organizational conditions are unsustainable.
Addressing this challenge requires moving beyond individual coping strategies toward systemic redesign of work itself. Organizations must prioritize alignment, autonomy, and ethical integrity alongside performance expectations. Sustainable work will depend on leaders who recognize that wellbeing and productivity are not competing priorities but interconnected outcomes that must be intentionally designed and supported together over time.
For ABP Members:
Not a member? We invite you to join us at The Association for Business Psychology!
About the Author
Dr. Jennifer Spencer is an organizational effectiveness speaker specializing in employee burnout and performance sustainability. Grounded in Frederick Herzberg and Albert Bandura, her work links individual self-efficacy to organizational outcomes. She brings over ten years in healthcare and seven years in education. Dr. Spencer has worked across classrooms, state government, and workforce development systems to improve performance and strengthen support structures. Her doctoral research studied over 250 teachers using Herzberg’s motivation theory and Bandura’s self-efficacy theory to examine burnout and sustainability. She is the author of Teaching on Empty and holds a PhD in Educational Leadership and an MBA.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. Freeman.
Bunderson, J. S., & Thompson, J. A. (2009). The call of the wild: Zookeepers, callings, and the double-edged sword of deeply meaningful work. Administrative Science Quarterly, 54(1), 32–57.
Dean, W., Talbot, S., & Dean, A. (2019). Reframing clinician distress: Moral injury not burnout. Federal Practitioner, 36(9), 400–402.
Duffy, R. D., Dik, B. J., Douglass, R. P., England, J. W., & Velez, B. L. (2018). Work as a calling: A theoretical model. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65(4), 423–439.
Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). Staff burnout. Journal of Social Issues, 30(1), 159–165.
Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. (1959). The motivation to work. Wiley.
Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2(2), 99–113.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.