Organizational Inertia and Teacher Burnout in High-Performance Schools: A Cross-Level Analysis of the Pressure Sinking Mechanism

High-performance schools confront a critical paradox: the very factors that once drove their success may become barriers to adaptation when facing environmental changes such as educational reforms and intensified competition. Using a century-old county-level key high school as a case study, this research employs a mixed-methods approach, combining semi-structured interviews with 32 stakeholders and longitudinal quantitative data analysis from 2020 to 2024, to investigate how organisational inertia operates in high-performance educational institutions and its impact on teacher burnout. We identify a “pressure sinking” mechanism: high-performance organisations maintain surface stability by systematically transferring adaptation responsibilities from the organisational level to individual members, whilst imposing structural costs on employees. Analysis reveals that organisational inertia operates through three processes formation and activation, pressure transfer mechanisms, and individual-level consequences, ultimately resulting in structural teacher burnout characterised by resource depletion, erosion of professional identity, and inadequate support systems. By connecting organisational inertia theory with individual burnout research through the concept of “pressure sinking”, this study provides a cross-level transmission model that explains how organisational adaptation failures systematically translate into individual work experiences, offering empirical guidance for educational leaders to identify warning signals and prevent systemic teacher burnout in high-performance schools.