Internal auditor burnout – an urgent area for research?
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Abstract
The article explores the problem of professional burnout among internal auditors. The phenomenon of professional burnout has been known for almost five decades, but the knowledge of it is still insufficient. This is a major problem because burnout affects more and more professions and the number of organizations struggling with its impacts is increasing. This paper was inspired by the author’s previous research into internal audit effectiveness. The internal auditors surveyed then reported among others that their profession was more at risk of burnout than many others, and seriously hindered their effectiveness. These findings led the author to conclude that being an internal auditor inherently involved a higher risk of burnout. Hence the aim of this theoretical paper is to assess the urgency of studying professional burnout among internal auditors. In the article question whether or not (and why) more research in this area was necessary, was answered. The article may be an incentive to undertake further research on internal auditor job burnout. In preparing the paper, research methods such as a critical analysis of the literature and content analysis were used. The paper is organised as follows. In Section 1 provides the introduction. Section 2 contains an overview of the risk factors for burnout among internal auditors. In section 3, the directions for future research are proposed based on the presented findings (discussion).
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