Christina Maslach, PhD

Job title: 
Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Bio/CV: 

Recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award

Christina Maslach is a Professor of Psychology (Emerita) and a core researcher at the Healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley.  She received her A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard-Radcliffe College (1967), and her Ph.D. from Stanford University (1971), and has been on the Berkeley faculty since then.  

Professor Maslach is the pioneer of research on the definition, predictors and measurement of job burnout. This work is the basis for the 2019 decision by the World Health Organization (WHO), to include burnout as an occupational phenomenon, with health consequences, in the ICD-11.  She created the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), the most widely used instrument for measuring job burnout, and has written numerous articles and books, including The Truth About Burnout. Several of her articles have received awards for their significance and high impact, including her longitudinal research on early burnout predictors, which was honored in 2012 as one of the 50 most outstanding articles published by the top 300 management journals in the world.  Recently, she received the 2017 Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award, as well as several lifetime career achievement awards.  In 2020, she received the award for Scientific Reviewing, for her work on burnout, from the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021, she was named by Business Insider as one of the top 100 people transforming business.  She also consults on the identification of sources of burnout and potential interventions. 

In addition to her research achievements, Professor Maslach is recognized as an outstanding teacher, having received a national award as Professor of the Year (1997), and both the Distinguished Teaching Award (1987) and the Berkeley Citation (2009) from UC-Berkeley.  She is also an accomplished administrator, having served as the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Instructional Technology, and as the Chair of the Academic Senate (twice) at UC-Berkeley.  She has also served twice as the president of the Western Psychological Association, most recently in 2020 when WPA celebrated its 100th anniversary.  Currently, she is involved in a project on Berkeley women faculty, in which she is interviewing those who joined the faculty in the 1970s, after the historic low point of women faculty in the late 1960s.

Research interests: 

job burnout, organizational and health psychology, individuation and dissent, gender roles

Publications

Cristina Banks, PhD; Christina Maslach, PhD; Alan Witt, PhD; Siw Tone Innstrand, PhD; Sally Augustin, PhD, MBA; Michael P. Leiter, PhD; Ragnhilk Wiik, PhD; Marit Christensen, PhD
Presentation, 2022
Cristina Banks, PhD; Christina Maslach, PhD; Siw Tone Innstrand, PhD; Marit Christensen, PhD; Ragnhilk Wiik, PhD
Poster, 2019
Christina Maslach, PhD; Cristina Banks, PhD
Book Chapter, 2017
Christina Maslach, PhD; Cristina Banks, PhD
Article, 2015