MBI: Maslach Burnout Inventory

MBI stands for Maslach Burnout Inventory, a standard questionnaire for measuring job burnout. Developed by Christina Maslach and Susan E. Jackson and first published in 1981, the MBI test asks people how often they have certain feelings about their work and scores three separate dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment.

In US healthcare, MBI also stands for Medicare Beneficiary Identifier, the ID number on a Medicare card. This page covers the burnout inventory.

MBI versions

The three subscales

In the Human Services Survey:

• Emotional Exhaustion (9 items): feeling emotionally overextended and drained by work.
• Depersonalization (5 items): a detached, impersonal attitude toward the people you serve.
• Personal Accomplishment (8 items): feelings of competence and achievement at work. This scale runs in the positive direction: lower scores point toward burnout.

Response scale

Every item is answered on a 7-point frequency scale:

How MBI scores are calculated and read

• Each subscale is scored separately, as the sum or the average of its items. The three scores are not added into one total burnout score.
• High burnout is a pattern: high Emotional Exhaustion, high Depersonalization (or Cynicism) and low Personal Accomplishment (or Professional Efficacy).
• Cut-off scores are not a diagnosis. The current MBI manual (4th edition, 2016) advises against using cut-offs to classify individuals as "burned out". Earlier low, moderate and high bands came from specific normative samples and don't transfer reliably between occupations, countries or translations.
• Profiles. Leiter and Maslach (2016) describe five profiles across the scales: Engaged, Ineffective, Overextended (high exhaustion only), Disengaged (high cynicism only) and Burnout (high on all three).

Burnout is not a medical diagnosis. The World Health Organization's ICD-11 lists it as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, and the MBI measures experiences rather than diagnosing illness.

Example of a group result: in a team of 40, the average Emotional Exhaustion item score is 3.4 (between "a few times a month" and "once a week"), while Depersonalization averages 1.2. The team is tired but still connected to the people it serves, which points to workload and recovery rather than relationships with clients.

Licensing: you can't copy the items

The MBI is copyrighted and published by Mind Garden, Inc. Using it requires a license, usually priced per respondent, and the items can't be reproduced freely. This page therefore describes the structure without quoting any items. Mind Garden also provides official translations and licenses that cover online administration; check the license terms before putting the items into any survey tool.

If you need a free instrument, the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005) is free to use, and the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory is another common research alternative. For a short internal pulse indicator, see burnout index.

Common mistakes

• Adding the three subscales into one number.
• Labeling individuals as burned out from cut-off scores, or sharing individual scores with managers.
• Copying items from the internet without a license, or translating them yourself.
• Running it non-anonymously at work. Fear of consequences pushes answers toward the "safe" end.
• Reporting very small teams, where people can recognize each other's answers.
• Measuring once and doing nothing. Results are useful only when they lead to changes in workload, staffing or support, followed by another measurement.

How to measure burnout with a survey

1. Choose the instrument: a licensed MBI version that matches the occupation, or a free alternative.
2. Make the survey anonymous and say so clearly in the invitation, together with how results will be reported.
3. Add context questions: department, workload, hours, and one open question about what drains or supports people.
4. Report group averages by subscale, only for groups large enough that no one can be identified.
5. Repeat after changes to see whether exhaustion goes down. Shorter pulse surveys can track the trend between full measurements.