Abstract
Teacher burnout is a psychological phenomenon affecting teachers’ effectiveness and wellbeing across the globe. Thus, education researchers have investigated its antecedents to identify approaches to alleviate teacher burnout. However, many of the existing studies tend to underline the effects of psychological factors but overlook the effects of structural factors on teacher burnout. Thus, the aim of this study is to fill the research gap by investigating how teacher burnout is affected by enabling school bureaucracy as a structural factor and psychological empowerment as a psychological factor based on empowerment theory. By using the self-administrated questionnaire survey, the study investigated 322 primary and secondary schoolteachers from China. It finds that structural empowerment and psychological empowerment are negatively associated with teacher burnout. Moreover, the relationship between structural empowerment and teacher burnout was mediated by psychological empowerment, especially its dimensions of meaning and competence.
Highlights
The results suggested that teacher burnout was significantly and negatively correlated with enabling school bureaucracy (r = −0.48, p < 0.01)
The findings showed that three dimensions of teacher burnout were negatively correlated with enabling school bureaucracy and all dimensions of psychological empowerment
Teacher burnout may be alleviated by enabling school bureaucracy and psychological empowerment
Summary
Teaching is one of the most stressful occupations in the world [1] because it requires teachers to deal with challenging students and parents [2,3] and handle heavy instructional, administrative, and pastoral workloads every day [4,5]. Compared with many other occupations, teachers are more prone to burnout [6,7]. According to Maslach et al [8], burnout is a psychological syndrome consisting of emotional exhaustion (the depletion of emotional sources), depersonalization (the feelings of detachment from and cynicism towards a job), and reduced personal accomplishment (a decline in the feelings of competence and efficacy at work). The syndrome is reported to have negative associations with teachers’ job dissatisfaction, commitment, work performance, and wellbeing [9,10,11,12]
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