The Relationship between Concern over Mistakes and Procrastination in Undergraduate: Academic Burnout as a Mediator

Procrastination is a general phenomenon among college students and is one of the major reasons for students to visit the counseling center for help. Many researches reported that procrastinators report ?concern over mistakes? as one of the main reasons to persist in procrastinating. Having ?concern over mistakes? implies catastrophic understanding of mistakes, regarding mistakes as failure. This perspective is also relevant to the notion of ?fear of failure. Avoiding mistakes and fearing failure has been discussed as having a strong effect on procrastination. However, there are mixed findings suggesting that concern over mistakes predict more effort and less procrastination. Therefore, there lies the need to investigate whether there is a third variable that explain the relationship between ?concern over mistakes? and procrastination. Previous literature notes ?burnout? as having a close association with ?concern over mistakes?. The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effects of academic burnout on the relationship between concern over mistakes and state procrastination. The participants were 205 college students in total who took academic counseling in the student counseling center. Participants completed self-report measures of academic procrastination (Academic Procrastination State Inventory), academic burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory?Student Survey), concern over mistakes (subscale of Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale). Structural equation modeling was used to test the mediational model derived from prior theory and research. Bootstrapping method was used to verify the significance of the mediation effect. The study results revealed that academic burnout fully mediated in the relation between concern over mistakes and procrastination and also contributed to the negative outcome of procrastination. Findings from the study indicate that as students become more preoccupied on their mistakes, they get more vulnerable to burnout, which leads to more procrastinating behavior. That is, concern over mistakes indirectly predicts procrastination. Implications on the counseling intervention involving academic burnout are discussed to promote better academic adjustment.