An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis of Teachers' Lived Experiences of Working with Traumatised Children in the Classroom

This study illuminates teachers' lived experiences of working with traumatised children in school environments. Children who experience trauma display a range of behaviours in the classroom which impact on attainment and outcomes. Dealing with childhood trauma in the classroom is challenging and brings risks to teachers' mental health including secondary traumatic stress and burnout. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was employed to understand the lived experiences of teachers working with traumatised children in the classroom. Findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with six teachers indicate that teachers increasingly support traumatised children in the classroom but there is a need for targeted trauma-informed training and effective support from senior management to support teachers' mental health and wellbeing.

A Systematic Review of the Factors That Influence Teachers' Occupational Wellbeing

Teachers belong to a high-demand occupational group and experience work-related challenges and discretely diverse emotional turmoils of varying intensity while teaching and interacting with students. These experiences often result in high stress levels that contribute to burnout and, consequently, a breach of teachers' occupational wellbeing. Promoting positive teacher wellbeing substantially influences teaching quality, with a flow-on effect on student wellbeing and academic development. This literature review utilised a framework to systematically explore the factors that impact the occupational wellbeing of kindergarten, primary, and secondary schoolteachers. Thirty-eight (38) studies from an initial 3766 peer-reviewed articles sourced from various databases (CINAHL, Emcare, PychINFO, Scopus, ERIC, and PsycARTICLES) were utilized for this systematic review. Four major factors were identified, including personal capabilities, socioemotional competence, personal responses to work conditions, and professional relationships. Findings highlight the importance of teachers' occupational wellbeing in dealing with numerous challenges and competing demands, with the need for a high level of self-efficacy for instruction and behavioural management being critically significant. Teachers require adequate organisational support to successfully carry out their roles with stronger resilience and efficient job execution. Teachers also need to have social-emotional competence to be able to create a high-quality classroom environment and a conducive atmosphere that supports healthy teacher-student relationships, reduces stress and increases the occupational wellbeing of teachers. Collaborating with other relevant stakeholders such as parents, colleagues, and a school's leadership team is critical for creating a positive work environment. A good workplace has the potential to contribute to teachers' occupational wellbeing and provide a supportive platform for student learning and engagement. This review clearly points to the beneficial effects of prioritising teachers' occupational wellbeing and its intentional inclusion in the professional development plan of practising teachers. Finally, while primary school teachers and secondary school teachers share many similarities in terms of the challenges they face, there are also some differences in how these challenges impact their wellbeing, and these warrant further investigation.

Influence of Resilience on Burnout Syndrome of Faculty Professors

This research aims to describe the relationship between resilience and burnout facing COVID-19 pandemics. The sample was n = 831 lecturers and professors of a Mexican public university. This study is a quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, explanatory, and ex post facto research using Structural Equations Modeling with latent variables under the partial least square's method technique. We used the CD-RISC-25 and SBI questionnaires to measure resilience and burnout, respectively. Structural Equations Modeling (SEM-PLS) allowed the visualization of the exogenous variable (resilience) in endogenous variables (dimensions of SBI burnout: E9 guilt, E7 emotional exhaustion, E8 indolence, and E6 work illusion). To this day, there are very few previous studies that jointly analyze in Mexico the characteristics of resilience and burnout in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings show that resources availability has the strongest correlation with accomplishment in teaching, followed by cynicism and emotional exhaustion. These results have important professional implications.

Who's more vulnerable? A generational investigation of COVID-19 perceptions' effect on Organisational citizenship Behaviours in the MENA region: job insecurity, burnout and job satisfaction as mediators

BACKGROUND

This paper is an empirical investigation that examines a path model linking COVID-19 perceptions to organisational citizenship behaviour (OCBs) via three mediators: job insecurity, burnout, and job satisfaction. The research examines the path model invariance spanning Generations X, Y, and Z. Three countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were the focus of the study.

METHODS

The data was collected from a sample of employees in service companies (n = 578). We used a Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) to analyse the data.

RESULTS

Our findings reveal that COVID-19 perceptions positively predict job insecurity, which positively impacts burnout levels. Burnout negatively predicts job satisfaction. The findings established that job satisfaction positively predicts OCBs. The mediation analysis determined that job insecurity, burnout and job satisfaction convey the indirect effects of COVID-19 perceptions onto OCBs. Finally, our hypothesised model is non-equivalent across Generations X, Y and Z. In that regard, our multi-group analysis revealed that the indirect effects of COVID-19 perceptions on OCBs were only valid amongst younger generations, i.e., Generation Y and Generation Z. Specifically, younger generations are substantially more vulnerable to the indirect effects of COVID-19 perceptions on their engagement in OCBs than Generation X whose job satisfaction blocks the effects of COVID-19 perceptions on OCBs.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study extends our knowledge of workplace generational differences in responding to the perceptions of crises or pandemics. It offers evidence that suggests that burnout, job attitudes and organisational outcomes change differently across generations in pandemic times.

Teacher Satisfaction in Relationships With Students and Parents and Burnout

In the educational field, the role of the support component of the teacher-student relationship is well known, while the role of the teacher-student relationship on teacher burnout is a more current field of investigation. Several studies on the sources of burnout have recently focused on job satisfaction and teacher-student satisfaction. However, the role of teacher-parent satisfaction is still little explored in this field. Moreover, in the Italian school context, students' seniority and educational level require further investigation, as the average age of teachers is particularly high compared to their European colleagues. The present study aims to examine in a sample of 882 Italian teachers the presence of burnout and differences in teacher-student and teacher-parent satisfaction between primary (students aged 6-10years) and lower secondary (students aged 11-13years) teachers. A further objective is to test whether teacher-student and teacher-parent satisfaction and seniority can be significant predictors of burnout. Teachers completed the Job Satisfaction Scale (MESI) and the MBI-Educators Survey and the data were then processed using MANOVA and multiple linear regression analysis. The results revealed that 8.2% of the teachers suffered from burnout and lower secondary teachers showed the highest levels of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment. Predictors of emotional exhaustion were job dissatisfaction and seniority, and predictors of depersonalisation were job dissatisfaction and teacher-student dissatisfaction. Finally, predictors of personal accomplishment were also teacher-parent satisfaction and teacher-student satisfaction. The implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed in this article.

Research on How Emotional Expressions of Emotional Labor Workers and Perception of Customer Feedbacks Affect Turnover Intentions: Emphasis on Moderating Effects of Emotional Intelligence

Previous studies have used various external variables and parameters as well as moderator variables such as emotional intelligence have been to understand emotional labor and its related problems. However, a comprehensive model to study such variables' correlations with each other and their overall effect on emotional labor has not yet been established. This study used a structural equation model to understand the relationship between employees' expression of emotional labor and perception of customer feedbacks. The study also looked at how the perception of customer feedback affects emotional exhaustion in order to understand how emotional exhaustion affects job satisfaction and turnover intentions. Further, in order to fully understand the effects of emotion on emotional labor at the service contact points, this study developed and tested a model of emotional labor with four factors of emotional intelligence as moderating factors. Five hundred and seventy nine emotional labor workers in service industries in the United States were collected and 577 valid survey results have been analyzed. The result shows that there exists moderating effects of emotional intelligence on how employees' Deep Acting and Surface Acting recognize customers' reactions, both positive and negative, that would affect employees' Emotional Exhaustion and Job Satisfaction, and hence, Turnover Intention. The result suggests that employees with better understanding of their own emotions, although they are more likely to recover from emotional exhaustion, experience a greater negative effect when there is a discrepancy between what they feel and how they should act.

Improving Chinese Teachers' Stress Coping Ability through Group Sandplay

Teachers are burdened by high work pressure, suggesting the need for an effective stress coping system to support them. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of coping strategies currently utilized by teachers and explored the potential contribution of group sandplay to coping. The study was led by a group of experienced therapists and sandplay practitioners. Two hundred teachers served as participants, equally divided into two groups: An experimental sandplay group (EG) and control group. Both groups received a 3-hour tutorial on the psychological pressure at work, reactions to it, and physical/mental symptoms resulting from overwhelming pressure, and were introduced to the working principles and process of sandplay. EG participants then engaged in group sandplay for three consecutive days. The Simplified Coping Style Questionnaire was used as an objective measure of participants' coping styles. Therapists' and practitioners' observations were used as subjective information, including the scenes and themes created by participants, individual performance during sandplay activities, and feedback regarding changes to stress coping strategies. We compared participants' pre-and post-test stress coping strategies. The results revealed a significant improvement in the EG sample at the shift from passive coping (pre-test M = 1.94, 95% CI [1.83-2.05]; post-test M = 0.96, 95% CI [0.92-1.00]) to active coping (pre-test M = 1.76, 95% CI [1.69-1.83]; post-test M = 2.41, 95% CI [2.29-2.53]). Overall, our findings support the conclusion that group sandplay effectively improved Chinese teachers' overall stress coping abilities.

Indisciplina em sala de aula: um estudo transcultural

A indisciplina em sala de aula é um fenómeno que representa uma preocupação à escala global. Neste estudo, realizado com professores do ensino primário ao ensino secundário, serão explorados a frequência e tipologia dos comportamentos problemáticos em sala de aula, o tempo que os professores estimam despender com a indisciplina, o nível de preparação que julgam ter para lidar com a indisciplina, a formação recebida na gestão de sala de aula e da indisciplina, e a evolução da indisciplina nos últimos cinco anos. Serão também exploradas variáveis culturais, comparando professores portugueses e angolanos em relação às variáveis mencionadas. Palavras-chave: Indisciplina, sala de aula, gestão da sala de aula, transculturalidade

Burnout among Swedish school teachers - a cross-sectional analysis

Background

Teachers are at high risk of stress-related disorders. This study aimed to examine the occurrence of burnout in a sample of Swedish school-teachers, to test a combined measure of three burnout dimensions on the individual level, to characterize associations between burnout and factors encountered during work and leisure time, and to explore any differences between the genders.

Methods

A questionnaire of occupational, sociodemographic and life-style factors was answered by 490 teachers in school years 4–9. Outcome measures were (a) the single burnout dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism and professional efficacy (Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey), and (b) a combined measure based on high or low values in the three dimensions. The combined measure was used to stratify the study population into four levels (0–3) of burnout. Multivariable Poisson regression was applied on level 2 + 3 vs. level 0 + 1, for variables that we considered as relevant risk factors for burn out.

Results

Half of the teachers reported low values in all three dimensions (level 0), whereas 15 were classified as having high burnout in at least two out of the three dimensions (level 2 + 3), and 4 % in all three dimensions (level 3). Almost all psychosocial factors were incrementally more unfavourably reported through the rising levels of burnout, and so were dissatisfaction with the computer workstation, pain, sleep problems and lack of personal recovery. There was no association between gender and rising levels of overall burnout (p > 0.30). Low self-efficacy, poor leadership, high job demands and teaching in higher grades were the variables most clearly associated with burnout in multivariable Poisson regression.

Conclusions

Even if circa 50 % of the teachers appear do well with respect to burnout, the results points to the need of implementing multifaceted countermeasures that may serve to reduce burnout.

Examining the Roles of Work Autonomous and Controlled Motivations on Satisfaction and Anxiety as a Function of Role Ambiguity

Past research in the self-determination theory has shown that autonomous motivation is associated with positive outcomes (e.g., work satisfaction), whereas controlled motivation is related to negative outcomes (e.g., anxiety). The purpose of the present research was to examine the moderating function of role ambiguity on the relationships between work autonomous and controlled motivations on the one hand, and work satisfaction and anxiety on the other. Six hundred and ninety-eight workers (449 men and 249 women) participated in this study. Results revealed that autonomous motivation was most strongly related to satisfaction when ambiguity was low. In addition, controlled motivation was most strongly related to anxiety when ambiguity was high. In other words, the present findings suggest that the outcomes associated with each form of motivation may vary as a function of role ambiguity. The present study thus offers meaningful insights for organizations, managers, and employees.

Preventing employee burnout during episodic organizational changes

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect that training and development have on employee burnout during episodic organizational changes. Moreover, it investigates the mediating role of overall job satisfaction (OJS) in conjunction with the moderating role of personal computer (PC) literacy.

Design/methodology/approach

– The study took place in Greece, in four branches of a public organization which adopted a new information technology (IT) system. Statistical analyses include exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis for instrument testing and multiple regressions for mediated moderation.

Findings

– The findings provide partial support to the hypotheses. It appears that employee training and development are significant predictors of burnout, indeed. However, OJS mediates the effect of one dimension of each, namely training effectiveness and support. Concerning PC literacy, a full-mediated moderation was revealed in the case of training effectiveness and a partial-mediated moderation in the case of support.

Research limitations/implications

– As with most studies examining change initiatives, the main limitations of this study are the cross-sectional design, the possible self-selection bias, and the limited sample size.

Practical implications

– The findings are important for preventing burnout during IT-related episodic changes, facilitating the successful implementation of change.

Originality/value

– To the best of knowledge, this study is the first to examine burnout in a changing public setting. Additionally, no previous direct evidence exists regarding the relationship between training and development and burnout while the evidence on the impact of organizational resources on burnout is scarce.