PERSON
Christina Maslach
The University of California, Berkeley social psychologist who built the science of occupational burnout—discovering that it is not a character flaw but a three-dimensional clinical syndrome located in the relationship between the person and the work environment—and whose framework now faces its most demanding test in the AI-augmented workplace.
Christina Maslach began her investigation of burnout in the 1970s by listening to human service workers describe what happened when the demands of caring for others chronically exceeded their capacity to recover. What she found was not weakness or inadequacy but a syndrome—a specific, measurable, three-dimensional clinical pattern she called the
three-dimensional model of burnout: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced personal accomplishment, each independently measurable, each requiring different interventions. The
Maslach Burnout Inventory she developed became the operational definition of burnout worldwide—translated into dozens of languages, administered to hundreds of thousands of workers, the instrument through which the field knows what burnout is. Her central argument, sustained across four decades of research, was against the prevalent assumption that burned-out workers needed fixing: burnout is located not in the person but in the relationship between the person and the work environment, and the appropriate target of intervention is