Scrutinizing EFL teachers' job satisfaction and stress at work: The intervening roles of gender, teaching experience, and educational level

Abstract

The present study sought to explore the relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) EFL teachers' stress at work and their job satisfaction. Moreover, it explored the role of EFL teachers' gender, length of teaching experience, and educational level in their job satisfaction and stress at work. For this purpose, 134 EFL teachers were chosen from different private language institutes in Mashhad, a city in northeast of Iran. They were asked to complete two questionnaires: Job Descriptive Index (JDI), and Stress in General Scale (SIG). Our findings indicated that teacher stress at work is negatively and significantly associated with job satisfaction. The results also showed that there were no significant gender differences regarding teachers’ job satisfaction except for pay. The data did not illustrate any significant difference between men and women concerning their stress at work. The findings of the present study also confirmed that the more years of experience teachers have, the more satisfied they are with their job. On the other hand, stress at work was found to have negative but significant correlation with teaching experience. Finally, data analysis demonstrated that a higher level of education corresponds to a higher degree of job satisfaction. In other words, the more educated a teacher is, the higher degree of job satisfactions/he tends to exhibit in his or her profession. The results also showed that there were significant differences in stress at work across the three groups of teachers with different levels of education.