What influences teachers’ job satisfaction and how to improve, develop and reorganize the school activities associated with them

Abstract

Job satisfaction is a positive emotional state resulting from a personal appreciation of a his/her own job or experience. The paper reports on a study that examined job satisfaction among secondary school teachers in the province of Naples. Low job satisfaction has recently been cited as a possible cause of the current teaching crisis in Italy. Moreover, it is positively correlated to work performance, and it is expected that a school having teachers with high levels of job satisfaction impart higher levels of education and turns out more successful students. The paper investigates the relationship between individual characteristics, factors and teacher job satisfaction. In particular, it focuses on three individual characteristics that are commonly linked to job satisfaction in the literature, gender, age and years of experience. For this paper, a short version of the questionnaire Common Assessment Framework and Education model shared by European Institute of Public Administration was administered to a sample of secondary school teachers. The use of descriptive analysis resulted in the identification of the following six major factors affecting teacher satisfaction: communication, involvement, leadership, school climate, structure and job satisfaction. We tested the influence of these factors on teacher job satisfaction. A Partial Least Square Path Modelling (PLS-PM) and external analysis in PLS-PM have been used to test the relationships involved in the research model.