What is the relationship between resilience and perceived levels of workplace stress among middle leaders in education?

Abstract

ABSTRACT According to the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE), there has been a 36.5% rise in reported cases of work-related stress between 2018/19 and 2019/20, to over 822,000 individual cases. Europe stress-related absence was second only to musculoskeletal disorders, with estimated work-related stress costing European companies 20 billion euros per year and accounted for nearly 60% of lost working days. This paper focuses on the under-researched area of stress among middle leaders in education. While it is widely reported that teachers face high levels of stress, as a result of organisational pressures, there is a paucity of research on middle leaders. This paper considers whether there will be a significant negative relationship between self-reported levels of resilience and self-reported levels of stress amongst 61 middle leaders. The two sets of data were subjected to cross-correlational quantitative analysis to establish the strength of the relationships between each of the six dimensions of resilience on perceived stress. Among the findings, a key result was that the question in the title was answered, namely that high resilience results in low stress in middle leaders in education. However, it was more nuanced than this and there were factors such as levels of peer support and an individual’s perception of their future which did contribute to a reduction in perceived levels of stress. The findings suggest that senior leaders in education have a greater impact on middle leaders’ levels of resilience and perceived levels of stress than they may think.