Abstract
School principals world-wide report high levels of strain and attrition resulting in a shortage of qualified principals. It is thus crucial to identify psychosocial risk factors that reflect principals' occupational wellbeing. For this purpose, we used the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ-II), a widely used self-report measure covering multiple psychosocial factors identified by leading occupational stress theories. We evaluated the COPSOQ-II regarding factor structure and longitudinal, discriminant, and convergent validity using latent structural equation modeling in a large sample of Australian school principals (N = 2,049). Results reveal that confirmatory factor analysis produced marginally acceptable model fit. A novel approach we call set exploratory structural equation modeling (set-ESEM), where cross-loadings were only allowed within a priori defined sets of factors, fit well, and was more parsimonious than a full ESEM. Further multitrait-multimethod models based on the set-ESEM confirm the importance of a principal's psychosocial risk factors; Stressors and depression were related to demands and ill-being, while confidence and autonomy were related to wellbeing. We also show that working in the private sector was beneficial for showing a low psychosocial risk, while other demographics have little effects. Finally, we identify five latent risk profiles (high risk to no risk) of school principals based on all psychosocial factors. Overall the research presented here closes the theory application gap of a strong multi-dimensional measure of psychosocial risk-factors.
Highlights
While teacher strain and consequent attrition have been identified as a worldwide problem (Tsouloupas et al, 2010; Dicke et al, 2015a, 2017), research on school principals’ occupational wellbeing is still scarce (Darmody and Smyth, 2016; though see Ilies et al, 2015; Fuller and Hollingworth, 2017)
The latent correlations of all factors based on the CFA, exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), and set-ESEM are reported in Table SI1-SI3
For examining the first-order factor structure of the COPSOQII long version we compared three different models: (1) a CFA, where cross-loadings are constrained to be zero, (2) ESEM with target rotation, were cross-loadings are allowed for all other factors, and (3) a set-ESEM approach with target rotation, were cross-loadings are only allowed within a defined set of factors. (For results of these tests regarding the medium and short version of the COPSOQ-II please see additional Supplementary Material Annex Tables SA1–7)
Summary
While teacher strain and consequent attrition have been identified as a worldwide problem (Tsouloupas et al, 2010; Dicke et al, 2015a, 2017), research on school principals’ occupational wellbeing is still scarce (Darmody and Smyth, 2016; though see Ilies et al, 2015; Fuller and Hollingworth, 2017). The Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire leading to high attrition and a shortage of qualified principals (e.g., Dewa et al, 2009; Riley, 2014, 2015, 2017; Grissom et al, 2015; Darmody and Smyth, 2016) This is alarming considering that principal leadership is crucial to a school environment that fosters teachers’ wellbeing (Collie et al, 2016) and indirectly (Arens and Morin, 2016; Klusmann et al, 2016) and directly students’ learning and wellbeing (Koh et al, 1995; Day, 2011). We have developed such an approach, where we allow loadings on multiple factors, but only within theoretically meaningful sets, an approach we name set-ESEM
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