Students' core self-evaluations and academic burnout: the mediating role of personal resources

Purpose Although many studies emphasize the need to design programs to help students manage post-pandemic burnout, few address personal resources' mediating role in the relationship between positive self-evaluation and experienced academic burnout. The present study aims to investigate the mediating role of two personal resources (i.e. psychological capital and proactive coping) on the relationship between core self-evaluations and academic burnout. Design/methodology/approach The research was carried out in the first part of 2022, at the end of two years of online teaching. The sample consisted of 183 Romanian university students who voluntarily filled in four questionnaires that measured core self-evaluations, academic burnout, psychological capital and proactive coping. To verify the hypotheses, a mediation analysis using the PROCESS 4.0 macro in SPSS 23.0, Model 6 was conducted. The indirect effect was tested based on a bias-corrected bootstrapping procedure with 5,000 samples, and a bootstrap confidence interval (95% CI). Findings Results showed that students with a high level of core self-evaluations report a low level of burnout. Also, students with positive core self-evaluations are more likely to use their psychological resources (i.e. psychological capital) and act proactively (i.e. proactive coping) in dealing with challenging situations, which can increase their burnout. However, the overall effect of the core self-evaluations on burnout was lower in the case of mediation by students' personal resources. Originality/value These research findings highlight the role of personal resources in coping with a challenging context, being among the few studies that have focused on student burnout in the immediate post-pandemic period. Furthermore, by working with malleable personal resources that can be enhanced through instruction, this research underlines how students can be taught to assess and develop these resources to cope with a highly demanding educational context.