How Can the Professional Community Influence Teachers’ Work Engagement? The Mediating Role of Teacher Self-Efficacy

Abstract

The sustainable development of education requires the continuous engagement of teachers, and the professional community has long been considered an important facilitator of teacher engagement. However, teachers’ professional community has often been analyzed as a unified construct, and thus the question of how teacher engagement is enhanced remains unanswered. Based on the conservation of resources theory, in this study, we investigated how teacher work engagement was affected by the crossover of job resources between the professional community (including shared norms, collective responsibility, collaboration, and reflective dialogue) and teachers (self-efficacy). The sample included 1123 primary and secondary school teachers in China. Covariance structural modeling was used to test our hypotheses. Shared norms and collective responsibility played a fundamental role and positively predicted collaboration, which in turn enhanced reflective dialogue. Teacher self-efficacy partially mediated the effect of the four dimensions of the professional community on teachers’ work engagement. The findings of this study indicate that the professional community offers valuable organizational and social resources that can be used by teachers to enhance their personal resources, such as self-efficacy, and thus become more engaged in their work. Shared norms and collective responsibility serve to shape a growth-oriented school culture that stimulates teachers’ willingness to collaborate and improves their confidence in teaching, and thus should be stressed by school leaders when introducing changes.