Job satisfaction, a reaction of employees’ feeling toward their jobs, was first introduced in 1920s but gained much importance in 1930-40s. Job satisfaction is important since it is connected with life satisfaction and it directly affects the professionals’ physical and mental health (Sevimli and İşcan, 2005). Job satisfaction is defined as: a positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job situation and is linked to the characteristics and demands of one’s work (Dressel, 1982; Butler, 1990; Arches, 1991). According to Gibson, Ivancevich and Donnelly (2000), job satisfaction is defined as the good feeling of an individual about their professions. Job satisfaction means the emotions, behaviors and the preferences about work (Chen, 2008). It is also defined as the amount of overall positive affect that individuals have toward their jobs in relation to a series of aspects such as pay, promotion opportuni­ties, the job itself, management style, working conditions and the work group (Arnold and Feldman, 1986).

Since decrease in job satisfaction brings about uneasiness and unhappiness, this can affect life satisfaction as well. Less job satisfaction prevents people fully concentrate on their professions which in turn, results in unhappiness on their jobs. This situation which is called as professional burnout will create an uneasy workplace environment that will prevent one doing his job efficiently.

Especially in recent decades, burnout has become one of the vital difficulties within different professions including education sector. Thus, researchers have studied the burnout concept increasingly. Although burnout can occur in any context, it has been mainly studied in the caregiving professions and the like. Burnout is conceptualized as resulting from long term occupational stress, particularly among human service workers (Jennett et al., 2003). The notion of burnout is a psychological syndrome involving emotional and interpersonal stressors that individuals’ experience at work settings and their subsequent responses to their tasks, organizations, colleagues, students and themselves (Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Maslach, 2003; Maslach & Leiter, 2008). One of the most frequently studied phenomena in educational researches is how educational stakeholders (teachers, administrators, supervisors, academicians) experience burnout. Maslach and Jackson (1981), who are the developers of mostly used inventory in the literature, argued that burnout is a multidimensional construct consisting of three separate dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and (reduced) personal accomplishment. High levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization along with low levels of personal accomplishment are indicative of burnout.

There are plenty of researches, done both in Europe and Turkey, to measure the burnout and job satisfaction levels of stakeholders in educational institutions from preschool level to higher education and for any job titles ranging from class teacher to academicians. However, in all these studies, there seems to be no consistent conclusion in terms of correlational relationship. This paper will do a systematic review using meta-analytic method. Even though previous researches indicate that measures of burnout predict low job satisfaction, few studies have explored the relative impact of the different dimensions of educational stakeholders’ burnout on job satisfaction. One purpose of this study is also to explore relations between the three dimensions of burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment) and job satisfaction.

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