project

goal?

The project aims to develop a self-report questionnaire to assess burnout, a work related state of mental exhaustion, which is an important cause of sickness absence and work incapacitation.

what?

The new burnout instrument will on the one hand be used as a screening instrument to identify employees who suffer from burnout (e.g. in epidemiological research or company surveys) and on the other hand as a diagnostic tool for assessing burnout among individual employees (e.g. in occupational health and psychological practice).

More information

team

Steffie desart

Steffie Desart joined the faculty in December 2015. She graduated in June ’15 as a master of science in Psychology and will dedicate the first two years of her PhD to a research proposal concerning burnout.

Before starting at the faculty she worked for IDEWE where she gained some experience as a research assistant Psychosocial Aspects. Within this function she taught a number of workshops concerning burnout, especially focused on employers or employees with a managing function.

The goal of her research proposal is to construct and validate a new questionnaire to asses burnout. This project will be conducted under the supervision of her promotor, prof. dr. Wilmar Schaufeli and her co-promotor, prof. dr. Hans De Witte.

She is our main contact for this project and keeps this website in order.

Wilmar schaufeli

Wilmar Schaufeli is sinds 1994 hoogleraar Arbeids- en Organisatiepsychologie aan de Universiteit Utrecht en sinds 2014 onderzoekshoogleraar aan de KU Leuven. Voorts is hij gasthoogleraar aan Loughborough Business School (Groot Brittannië) en Jaume I Universitat, Castellon (Spanje).

Hij doctoreerde aan de Universiteit Groningen (1989), alwaar hij als universitair docent klinische psychologie werkte van 1978 tot 1989. Van 1989-1994 was hij universitair hoofddocent aan de Universiteit Nijmegen.

Zijn belangrijkste onderzoeksveld is de psychologie van arbeid en gezondheid. In 2014 ontving hij van Thomson Reuters de onderscheiding ‘Highly Cited Reseacher’; hij behoort tot de top 1% van meest publicerende vakgenoten op het gebied van psychologie/psychiatrie (www.wilmarschaufeli.nl). Dr. Schaufeli is fellow van de European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology, geregistreerd arbeids- en organisatiepsycholoog en werkt part-time als organisatie consultant (www.3ihc.nl).

Hans De Witte

Prof. Dr. Hans De Witte is Professor Work Psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the KU Leuven. He belongs to the Research Group Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology (WOPP), which is part of the Research Unit Occupational & Organisational Psychology and Professional Learning (O2L). He is also Extraordinary Professor at the Optentia Research Focus Area, Vaal Triangle Campus, North-West University, South Africa.

He studied Psychology at the KU Leuven (Masters in Psychology 1982) and got his PhD in Work Psychology in October 1991 at the same university (title: Conformisme, Radicalisme en Powerlessness. A study of the socio-cultural and socio-economic attitudes of blue collar workers in Flanders (Belgium) Supervisor: Prof. Dr. L. Lagrou). From 1984 until 2000 he worked at the Higher Institute of Labour Studies (HIVA) of the KU Leuven, where he became Head of the Unit Work in 1995.

During academic year 1999-2000 he worked at the Research Group Personnel, Work and Organizational Psychology of the University of Ghent for one year. From the academic year 2000-2001 on, he works at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the KU Leuven, where he got appointed as Full Professor in 2007.