ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicTransforming Work Environments: The Impact of Healing Workplaces on Employee Wellbeing and Organizational PerformanceView all 10 articles
Perceived Organizational Support and Academic Job Burnout: A Comparative Study of Career Stages and Professional Sectors
Provisionally accepted
Juan Zhang1*
Xianghui Zhao2- 1School of Economics, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China
- 2Peking University, Beijing, China
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Objective: Job burnout among academic professionals is a growing concern in organizational psychology, with important implications for employee wellbeing and the sustainability of knowledge-intensive work environments. This study examines the relationship between perceived organizational support and job burnout, and whether this relationship varies across career stages and professional sectors. Methods: Data were drawn from the Nature Career Job and Salary Satisfaction Survey 2021, a large-scale international survey of academic working conditions. The survey was administered in five languages and yielded 3,210 valid responses from academic professionals across 95 countries. Results: Three key findings emerge. First, burnout is widespread, with women, early-career researchers, and those in academia facing higher risks. Second, cross-national comparisons suggest heterogeneous patterns in which organizational support and job burnout do not always align. Third, organizational support is significantly associated with lower levels of burnout, though the strength and direction of this association vary across career stages and sectors. Implications: These findings suggest the need to view burnout as an early warning signal, establish structured support systems, and deliver targeted interventions to promote a more sustainable academic environment.
Keywords: Academic profession, Career stage, Job burnout, Organizational support, professional sector, research engagement
Received: 06 Jan 2026; Accepted: 12 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Zhang and Zhao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Juan Zhang
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