Teachers’ mental accounting of positive and negative social support and its relationship with high-quality role behaviors in Korean school setting

Abstract

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers perform the mental operations of social support, which are expressed as variations in their high-quality role behaviors.
 [Methods] This research examined issues such as account bracketing, framing, spillover effects, and the balance period pertinent to the processing of social support with the methods of multiple regression and structural equation modeling.
 [Results] Results indicated that accounts of positive and negative social support are processed separately, and negative social support is regarded as a cost rather than loss. This study also revealed the spillover effects in the path from positive social support from students to teachers’ behaviors concerning administrative affairs.
 [Conclusion] The addition of knowledge about mental processing will reduce a part of the ambiguous relationship of social support with teacher behaviors by explaining the mechanism between them.