Read Before Burning #12: Can Injustice Trigger Burnout?

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Bah, how bad could INJUSTICE really be?

Read Before Burning Issue 12 asks the question, “Can injustice trigger burnout?”

Welcome to Read Before Burning, a monthly newsletter by psychologist Dr Ben J. Searle. Come here for simple but informative coverage of burnout-related concepts, research findings, and actionable advice – all firmly grounded in science (and guaranteed AI-free).

Who am I? After earning a PhD in psychology, I spent 20 years in academia studying stress and burnout until I went through burnout myself. I now research, consult, and communicate about burnout and what to do about it.

I also do other kinds of consulting work, such as investigating psychosocial hazards and developing reliable tools for measuring workplace phenomena. Reach out if you think I might be able to help you with something!

CAN INJUSTICE TRIGGER BURNOUT?

Burnout can have serious consequences, not only for those of us who experience it, but also for our teams and their organisations. To avoid these consequences, we need to:

  • Understand the many potential causes (psychosocial hazards, see RBB Issue #02) whose combined effects accumulate over time until burnout becomes too severe to ignore;
  • Monitor our workplaces effectively to assess these hazards; and
  • Take preventative action to eliminate or minimise the hazards we detect, or at very least implement controls that can mitigate the hazards’ effects.

But something that is rarely discussed in articles and books about burnout is that this condition – one that usually develops slowly over months or even years – can spike from moderate to severe at the drop of a hat. A great many folks who have been through burnout can describe a specific event or series of experiences after which the job never felt the same again. Something happened that was the proverbial Last Straw.

I’m not saying one experience can burn out someone who was completely fine just minutes earlier. I’m saying that although burnout develops slowly as a result of psychosocial hazards that have accumulative effects, it nevertheless seems that many people endure moderate symptoms of burnout for months or years until a specific experience triggers a shift into severe burnout.

And the common factor behind these experiences is usually injustice.

Why Is Injustice Such A Problem?

It is not controversial (I hope!) to say that injustice is bad. As I’ve mentioned before, organisational injustice is one of six psychosocial hazards commonly associated with burnout. But what is it about injustice that could trigger the shift from moderate burnout to severe burnout?

Emotion: Acts of injustice tend to fire up our emotions. Studies show that experiences of injustice (including real world, workplace experiences) tend to make us stressed, angry, and dissatisfied – both immediately and for some time afterwards. This likely contributes to emotional exhaustion, but it doesn’t quite explain why we would experience a dramatic change in the other burnout symptoms (see RBB Issue #01 for a discussion of symptoms).

Coping and Health: Studies show that employees experiencing higher levels of organisational injustice are less likely to use problem-focused coping strategies and more likely to use maladaptive forms of coping (e.g., heavy drinking). There is a certain logic to this: to someone caught in an unjust system, trying to fix the problem may seem like wasted effort (especially if the injustice benefits someone more powerful). This may help to explain the research finding that organisational injustice is linked to several indicators of poor health. But neither of these associations explain why burnout symptoms sometimes get much worse almost immediately after an unjust event.

Perceptions: A much more compelling explanation is that experiences of injustice can cause a profound shift in the way we perceive our jobs, our co-workers, or our work environments.

This image shows the eye and part of a face wearing spectacles, on which is reflecting a graph from a computer screen. It's not perfect for the context but it was the best I could find to illustrate the notion of, "How can injustice trigger burnout? It might cause a change in perception."
Injustice might trigger burnout by changing our perceptions of work or the workplace.

Consider this quote from a research paper published by burnout experts Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter:

“It could be that fairness plays a unique and central role in defining the workplace in fundamental terms as either a good place or a bad place to be. Once people begin to feel hostile and angry about job inequities, and lack faith in organizational processes to right any wrongs, this may set in motion an increasing cascade of negative reactions to the job.”

(Maslach & Leiter, 2008, p. 508)

In other words, injustice has the potential to change our perception of the workplace from a basically good (if imperfect) place with basically decent (if imperfect) co-workers into a dangerous place where decisions are unreasonable and people are mean and selfish.

And as Professors Maslach and Leiter suggest, such a change might amplify feelings of anger and fear, and lead us to apply a more cynical lens to more and more aspects of work – in a way that could conceivably bring on a rapid spike in burnout symptoms.

But Can It Really Happen So Quickly?

Image shows a stopwatch to represent a question like, "Can injustice trigger burnout this quickly?"

The quote I presented above comes from a study in which injustice was one of the strongest predictors of increases in burnout (a finding that has been replicated in several other studies). That study administered surveys twice — a full year apart! So I acknowledge that Maslach and Leiter weren’t describing a short-term experience or event triggering a burnout meltdown.

And yet…

Even though justice is often treated (and measured) as an enduring quality of workplaces, real life injustice often plays out at the event level. In other words, a brief experience can create a powerful sense of injustice, as in the following experiences (these aren’t mine, but they all happened to people I’ve met):

  • My boss shouted at me for not coming to work the day my father died.
  • I got assigned a thankless task that wasn’t part of my job.
  • A co-worker took credit for my work.
  • I was blamed for someone else’s mistake.
  • I didn’t get that promotion, despite being the most experienced candidate.
  • I complained about the co-worker who mistreated me, and he got off with a warning.
  • I was promised accommodations, but my boss said they were too hard to implement.

When researchers look at events that feel unjust (e.g., uncivil behaviour or illegitimate tasks) using experience-sampling methods (i.e., repeated measurements that let researchers see the effects of short-term experiences), they find such events have immediate and powerful effects on moods and attitudes. There are even indications that unfairness can be more stressful when it’s more unpredictable.

Furthermore, burnout is associated with reduced emotional regulation, reduced stress tolerance, and increased rumination about work (see RBB Issue #06). So if someone who has been struggling with burnout for months and months is treated unjustly at work, the resulting stress and anger might be unusually intense and prolonged (due to reduced tolerance and regulation capabilities). They might well ruminate obsessively about the event for some time, and start to perceive work in a different way.

I believe this could be enough to shift someone with moderate burnout into severe burnout.

What Can We Do About It?

This image shows someone writing on one of a series of coloured post-it notes stuck on a wall. I'm trying to express the idea of, "If injustice can trigger burnout, let's do something about it!"
Sometimes, the greatest injustice is to do nothing.

Since you already know that organisational injustice is a big risk factor for burnout, there are several actions you should already be taking – the same ones I listed at the start of this article:

  • Know what psychosocial hazards to monitor,
  • Monitor them, and then
  • Eliminate them, reduce them, or mitigate their effects.

If you do a good enough job with these steps, your employees shouldn’t be burning out, so unanticipated experiences of unfairness are unlikely to trigger severe burnout.

But that doesn’t mean you’re done.

Because it’s rarely going to be possible to provide pure equality. In an imperfect world with limited resources, even the fairest decisions can leave someone feeling they didn’t get what they deserved. This is an issue of distributive justice, and the good news is there are other kinds of justice we can fall back on.

Possibly the most important is procedural justice — how fairly things are done. One of the reasons why injustice is treated as an enduring quality of workplaces is that intrinsic unfairness in systems and processes mean injustices will keep happening. Consider these examples:

  • A first-offence harassment case (where prior reports about the perpetrator’s problem behaviours have resulted in no investigations or actions);
  • The company’s first legal challenge to a selection decision that the hiring team say was “fair” (yet they’ve always been reluctant to make their decision-making process transparent); or
  • The department’s first ever complaint about an award given to one member of a successful team (where systems encourage individual rather than collective rewards and recognition).

In each case, reports of injustice might have seemed unexpected and uncontrollable, but they were predictable outcomes of systemic problems. It takes ongoing effort to ensure your systems and processes are fair. Transparency, consultation, and accountability are often critical.

Fair and transparent processes can reduce the pain of (perceived or actual) distributive injustices, but there’s still more you can do. When difficult decisions are communicated sensitively – with kindness, compassion, and honesty, this is called relational or interpersonal justice. It’s not quite the same as leader support (since you can have leader who is generally supportive leader but not good at relational justice, or vice versa), but the good news is that leader support is another factor that can reduce the effects of organisational injustices.

In short, you can’t please everyone through distributive justice, but you can strive to have consistently good procedural and relational justice with supportive leaders.

References

Beattie, L., & Griffin, B. (2014). Day-level fluctuations in stress and engagement in response to workplace incivility: A diary study. Work & Stress, 28(2), 124-142.

Cachon-Alonso, L., & Elovainio, M. (2022). Organizational justice and health: Reviewing two decades of studies. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 2022(1), 3218883.

Eatough, E. M., Meier, L. L., Igic, I., Elfering, A., Spector, P. E., & Semmer, N. K. (2016). You want me to do what? Two daily diary studies of illegitimate tasks and employee well‐being. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(1), 108-127.

Gupta, R., Chaudhuri, M., Malik, P., & Kakkar, S. (2025). Red tape, role conflict, and organisational injustice in bureaucracies: Exploring the interplay of stressors and coping in public sector burnout. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 47(4), 371-394.

Kivimäki, M., Elovainio, M., Vahtera, J., & Ferrie, J. E. (2003). Organisational justice and health of employees: Prospective cohort study. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 60(1), 27-34.

Kouvonen, A., Kivimäki, M., Elovainio, M., Väänänen, A., De Vogli, R., Heponiemi, T., Linna, A., Pentti, J., & Vahtera, J. (2008). Low organisational justice and heavy drinking: A prospective cohort study. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 65(1), 44-50.

Matta, F. K., Scott, B. A., Colquitt, J. A., Koopman, J., & Passantino, L. G. (2017). Is consistently unfair better than sporadically fair? An investigation of justice variability and stress. Academy of Management Journal, 60(2), 743-770.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2008). Early predictors of job burnout and engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(3), 498-512. [link to article]

van der Molen, H. F., Nieuwenhuijsen, K., Frings-Dresen, M. H., & de Groene, G. (2020). Work-related psychosocial risk factors for stress-related mental disorders: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 10(7), e034849.

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