Background
Teachers´ psychological job demands (large class sizes, low social support, and expectations to care for pupils, parents and colleagues) are positively related to their emotional exhaustion. Teachers´ psychological job resources (autonomy, mastery of skills, and experiences of their work as incentive and interesting) are positively related to work motivation and engagement, which can be defined as the positive antipode of emotional exhaustion. In addition, job demands and resources may, in general terms, explain the relationships between the employee and different work motivation- and mental illness outcomes.
Furthermore, teachers´ personal work-identity comprises cognitive- (coherence, correspondence, mental time, reflection, agency) and emotional- (attachment, belongingness, closeness) components, differently associated with various work-related outcomes. Our previous results show that the cognitive component positively relates to emotional exhaustion, and the emotional one positively relates to self-determined work motivation. These relationships have up to date not been theoretically and practically related to organizational/job characteristic factors, such as, job demands and resources.
Aims
Firstly, we investigated if a positive relationship between teachers´ cognitive personal work-identity and emotional exhaustion was mediated by psychological job demands. Secondly, we checked for if a positive relationship between teachers´ emotional personal work-identity and self-determined work motivation was mediated by psychological job resources.
Methods
768 members, representing eleven different local teachers´ trade unions, working in the south and middle part of Sweden replied to a digitized questionnaire measuring cognitive- and emotional components of personal work identity, job demands (prosocial extra-role performances) and resources (educational inspirations), emotional exhaustion and self-determined work motivation. Two mediation analyzes were performed by PROCESS macro for SPSS (version 2.16.3), model 4.
Results
A positive relationship between teachers´ cognitive personal work- identity and emotional exhaustion was mediated by psychological job demands: completely standardized indirect effects: β= .04, 95% CI [.0180, .0650].
Also, a positive relationship between teachers´ emotional personal work- identity and self-determined work motivation was positively mediated by psychological job resources: completely standardized indirect effect: β= .09, 95% CI [.0569, .1178].
This suggests that, when teachers think (cognitive component of work-identity) more of their work, they will be more emotionally exhausted, but when they feel (emotional component of work-identity) more of their work they will be more motivated to work. Psychological job demands and resources may however and to some extent explain these relationships, respectively.