Serious Leisure, Passion, and Burnout

This study examined the relationships between aspects of serious leisure, dualistic passion, and burnout in the MBI-GS and BM. Serious leisure has been shown to improve leisure and general life outcomes, but little research considers how harmonious or obsessive leisure engagement affects these outcomes or has extended serious leisure benefits to the workplace. Overall, the study hypothesized that leisure seriousness, harmonious passion, and satisfaction with time spent in serious leisure will negatively correlate with burnout, and obsessive passion will degrade the benefits derived from serious leisure. 240 participants completed Gould's Serious Leisure Inventory, the Passion Scale, the Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey, and the Burnout Measure. Leisure seriousness negatively correlated with exhaustion in the MBI-GS (r = -.16) and burnout in the BM (r = -.20), and positively correlated with professional efficacy in the MBI-GS (r = .16). When dualistic passion is introduced, however, significant noise is introduced into these relationships. Higher levels of harmonious passion strengthen an otherwise non-significant negative correlation between leisure seriousness and cynicism, and unexpectedly, higher levels of obsessive passion strengthen the negative correlation between leisure seriousness and BM burnout. No other significant moderation effects were found.