Abstract
Work and organizational psychology has long been concerned with measuring job satisfaction in organizational contexts, and this has carried across to the field of education, leading to a research focus on the work-related satisfaction of teachers. Today, a myriad of organizations continue to assess employees’ job satisfaction on a routine basis (Liu, Borg, & Spector, 2004). Unfortunately, a sort of balkanization of the field has resulted in the production of dozens of specific measurement tools, making it difficult to cross-compare samples and contexts. The present paper tested the measurement invariance of the Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale (TJSS) in six international cohorts (Netherlands, United States, Russia China, Italy and Palestine) of in-service teachers (N = 2,819). Confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group invariance tests were applied. The TJSS-9 displayed robust psychometric proprieties and no substantial departures from measurement invariance (configural and metric). Future research is required to further test equivalence across additional countries, with view to developing a truly international tool for measuring job satisfaction in teaching.
Highlights
Work and organizational psychology has long been concerned with measuring job satisfaction in organizational contexts, and this has carried across to the field of education, leading to a research focus on the work-related satisfaction of teachers
The present study evaluated the measurement invariance of the Teacher Job Satisfaction Scale (TJSS-9) in six cohorts of primary teachers at state-run schools in six countries
The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported a measurement model of job satisfaction in educational contexts covering three domains explaining 79.5% of variance in teachers’ overall work-related satisfaction: satisfaction with students, satisfaction with co-workers and satisfaction with parents
Summary
Work and organizational psychology has long been concerned with measuring job satisfaction in organizational contexts, and this has carried across to the field of education, leading to a research focus on the work-related satisfaction of teachers. Employees’ job satisfaction is inversely associated with general (Hanebuth, 2008) and injury-related absenteeism (Drakopoulos & Grimani, 2013), intention to leave the workplace (MacIntosh & Doherty, 2010; Tschopp, Grote, & Gerber, 2014), counterproductive interpersonal and organizational behaviors (Mount, Ilies, & Johnson, 2006), job-related stress (Boudreaux, Mandry, & Brantley, 1997), psychological distress (Moen, Kelly, & Lam, 2013) and biological markers of ill-health (such as higher levels of inflammatory cytokines and other lymphocytes; Amati et al, 2010) Such negative effects on the teaching professions are crucial since, for instance, job related stress is negatively related with students’ academic achievement (Banerjee & Lamb, 2016; Kalyva, 2013)
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