Work-related anxiety and mental disorders are common among tech employees. Software developers have a considerably higher likelihood of feeling fatigue, burnout, anxiety, and stress, compared to their colleagues who perform mechanical tasks. Deteriorating mental health threatens the well-being of employees and the companies’ overall productivity. Retaining developers in today’s “Great Resignation" era requires companies to create the right balance in creating team cultures that allow for high performance and workforce engagement without inducing high stress and burnout.

An organizational culture that promotes psychological safety, shared responsibilities, and out-of-box thinking can improve team performance as workers in such a culture feel engaged, motivated, and responsible for their teams’ products. Indeed, prior DevOps research has found a direct association between culture and high burnout and cultural impact on software delivery performance, individually. However, burnout and performance are closely connected: high-performance teams may feel higher pressure and therefore have higher burnout. Therefore, it is important to study the triadic relationship in its entirety. Our hypothesis is that organizational cultures that are “generative" reduce the burnout that may come from high performance. To empirically evaluate our hypothesis, we ran a survey (N =5600 developers at a multinational consulting company) and used the Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Models (PLS-SEM) with Moderation analysis method to investigate the relationships between stability, organizational culture, and well-being. Results support our hypothesis: organizational culture not only directly impacts well-being but also is a moderator in reducing burnout when teams strive for high performance.