Teachers’ Resilience to Occupational Stress and Burnout

Abstract

The article presents an empirical research carried out on a sample of 156 middle and high school teachers from the Republic of Moldova. The study was conducted in two stages: the first stage aiming to investigate to what extent school teachers are affected by burnout and what are the main symptoms they typically manifest in their teaching activity. The second stage was focused on examining a range of organizational and person related burnout factors in accordance with the conceptual framework of organizational health, which suggests adopting a more comprehensive approach to issues related to stress and burnout. Thus teacher’s motivation as a person related factor and the psycho-emotional climate along with the satisfaction of basic needs in the work place as organizational factors were investigated. It was found that majority of teachers display such symptoms of burnout as the feeling of overload due to excessive involvement in their job tasks resulting from their strong need to demonstrate high performance. The lack of control over the results of their teaching activity and the lack of acknowledgement of the efforts invested are other two major symptoms of burnout. Teaches with lower level of burnout demonstrate a stronger motivation for competence, they manage better to satisfy their basic needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness in the organizational context and also perceive as more favorable the psycho-emotional climate in their job place. These teachers stay longer in their profession (have more years of teaching experience) thus demonstrating a higher resilience to stress and burnout. Some suggestions for future research are also provided.