Burnout
Retaining well-qualified teaching professionals is a growing concern as burnout and work-related illnesses are reducing the number of highly capable workers.
According to Maslach and Jackson [
1] the exposure to chronic stress may lead to burnout, a “psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment, which can occur among individuals who work with other people in some capacity”. E.g. Gascon et al. used that definition [
2] (p.2): “The authors understand burnout to be the most serious consequence of job stress, when all coping strategies have failed and the individual feels emotionally drained, unconnected to their work and useless.” Other authors use other definition of stress like Demerouti et al. [
3] (p 501) which use the term “stressor” only when an external factor has the potential to exert a negative influence on most people in most situations.
These authors refer to the definition of stress of Lazarus & Folkman and McGrath [
4,
5] according to which stress is defined in terms of a disruption of the equilibrium of the cognitive-emotional-environmental system by external. Thus, external factors known as stressors could also lead to a state of well-being, as long as the person in question has adequate coping and performance capabilities. On the other hand, international standards, including those of the European Union, have been based on the Plath and Richter [
6] model, which establishes that stressors are one of the short – term consequences of strain at work (among others such satiation, monotony and mental fatigue).
Following this conceptualization, stressors are understood as complex psychosomatic reactions to situations of overload or underload, causing frustration of personal goals and feelings of discomfort and tension [
6,
7]. A prolonged exposure to stress situations would lead to the continuous feeling of stress, exhaustion and, finally, health problems.
Teachers are frequently confronted with interpersonal processes, as they work in environments of constant interaction with fellow teachers, students, and parents. Additionally, they are the source of interpersonal conflict management between their students on a daily basis. Teachers therefore constitute a specific sample of employees, among mangers and nurses, who experience higher levels of work-related stress, in comparison with other groups [
8,
9]. Teachers are continuously exposed at external stressors [
10], interpersonal factors in particular, which influence negatively their health [
11,
12].
Kyriacou [
13] (p. 28) defines the teacher’s stress as an “
experience by a teacher of unpleasant, negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, tension, frustration or depression, resulting from some aspect of their work”. He additionally found that teachers had low levels of well-being caused by many workplace factors. These workplace factors included time spent at work, level of workload, ability to manage change, student behavioural problems, student motivation, being evaluated by others, role conflict and ambiguity, poor working conditions, self-esteem and status [
13]. The factors leading to low levels of well-being among teachers have been identified and the relationship between teacher’s stress and job satisfaction [
14] is well known. Therefore it is an important next step in the research to better understand the factors that are behind teacher’s wellbeing.
Demand – Control model
In the demand-control model of stress [
15], job demands constitute the main stressor, which increases when the individual has low levels of perceived control over their work situation. Job demands, refer to an employee’s workload, which have been defined as the amount of work that needs to be done, time pressures and conflicting demands. The idea of control derived from Demand - Control model [
16] studies the importance of being able to make decisions at work. This notion is supported by other empirical studies, which have found that job autonomy is crucial for the health of employees. This model also served as the basis for Leiter and Maslach [
17] (p. 59) for the ideation of the questionnaire of six areas of worklife where the Demand – Control model is reflected in the area of workload and control.
Six areas of Worklife
Leiter and Maslach [
18] identified six areas or - sub-scales of the work environment as most relevant to the relationships people develop with their work. The first area is workload, which represents the number of hours worked, the amount of time needed to recover after work, and the nature of workload one carries (heavy, light, difficult, dangerous etc.). The second area of worklife is control. Control at work encompasses employees’ perceived capacity to influence decisions that affect their work and access to the resources that enable them to develop professionally. The third area of worklife is reward and recognition, which is characterized by adequate pay, appreciation from service recipients or supervisors, promotion prospects, and other forms of recognition. The fourth area of worklife is community, which assesses integration within the team, mutual trust, and the overall social network within the workplace. The fifth area of worklife is fairness, which represents discrimination, favouritism, and other employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace. The last area of worklife is values, which measures the extent to which one’s personal values align with their organization’s values.
The Areas of Worklife Scale (AWS) has been designed with the objective to assess the workplace within the context of organizational interventions both for researchers and practitioners. In this model, the level of perceived balance between the person and the job is the key point in developing better adaptation [
18].
The scale has been recently translated into Spanish and validated [
2] in a sample of health professionals and therefore can be used in Spanish-speaking countries to assess job stressors that contribute to burnout. However, there is no validation with the sample of teachers in Spain to date so that being the first study to verify the factorial structure of this questionnaire in education professionals allows us to investigate the usefulness of this test to measure burnout teacher.
The survey is comprised of 29 items. It can also be used together with the Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey (MBI-GS); [
19] a questionnaire of 16 items that provide information on the three dimensions of the burnout-engagement continuum: exhaustion-energy; cynicism-involvement; and inefficacy-efficacy. Gascón et al. [
2] has used MBI-GS to evaluate its concurrent validity of Spanish version of AWS.
Workload and control
The areas of workload and control are based on Demand-Control model of job stress [
15,
20]. Many studies have shown [
21], recently Nishimura et al. [
22], that increased workload has a strong relationship with the exhaustion dimension of burnout. In fact, Leiter and Maslach [
18] (p.96) note that “A sustainable workload stops the cycle of exhaustion…(and) is a driving force in the experience of burnout for many people”.
The changes in recent years have made a modification in the perception of teachers, who apart from their traditional functions also have an important role to promote healthy behaviors and actively collaborate in the tasks of attention to students with specific educational needs, among others. Some authors use the term intensification to refer to this extension of the task range that now encompasses a multitude of actions [
23].
Regarding control, it is generally accepted in the field of organizational psychology that job stressors tend to reduce the individual’s capacity to exert the control over ones work. Likewise, the conservation of resources theory of stress [
24] maintain that burnout is more likely to occur when certain resources, control amongst others, are lost or inadequate to meet the demands. Studies have found that stress-related outcomes can be improved by increasing people’s control over their work [
25], once again pointing to the strong relationship between sense of control and stress. Ballet and Kelchtermans [
23] explain that the experience of intensification is largely characterised by a loss of control.
A sense of community is derived from a positive social environment with no office politics and incivility. Community has been primarily described in terms of social support received from supervisors, coworkers, and networks of family and friends [
26]. It is associated with greater engagement [
27] and exhaustion [
28]. As demonstrated in Bakker [
29] social support is one of the most important predictors of extra-role performance, through its relationship with the disengagement component of burnout.
Reward
Reward represents a meaningful reward system in place for employees. Specifically, the reward can be verbal recognition or even monetary rewards, such as bonuses. It also gives clear indications of what the organization values are [
30]. Employees will experience the most balance when they are rewarded adequately for the effort they put into their job. This is consistent with Siegrist effort-reward imbalance model [
31]. Studies have also found that insufficient reward is strongly related to burnout [
32].
Fairness
Employees with high perceptions of fairness have been described by Leiter and Harvie [
33,
34] as individuals who find that there is little to no injustice within their workplace, no unfair promotions, and no favouritism. They also purpote that fairness is related to burnout. Specifically, they state that supervisors who are both fair and supportive induce more acceptance of major organizational change and their subordinates are less susceptible to burnout.
Employees who perceive their supervisors being both fair and supportive are less susceptible to burnout, and are more accepting of major organizational change [
33]. Fairness can be explained by the effort-reward-imbalance model [
35]; a perceived imbalance between high efforts spent and low rewards received leads to high impact of adverse health effects.
Values
Strong values alignment indicates that the same things that give employees a sense of accomplishment at work are also valued by their organization. The professions in which the commitment to work is essential, should reflect them in the organizational mission which will be followed by the organization and the worker. This incompatibility of values between the organization and the employee has been found to increase the occupational burnout and decrease the work engagement [
36]. Conflict in values is related to all dimensions of burnout [
33]. Also has been found that the value congruence of employees with the organization has more impact on job satisfaction than the value congruence among co-workers [
37].