Nong Liying, Ye Jian-Hong, Hong Jon-Chao
Dhurakij Pundit University, Bangkok, Thailand.
School of Education and Music, Hezhou University, Hezhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 27;13:895664. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.895664. eCollection 2022.
The COVID-19 epidemic in the early 2020s is making a big difference for educators around the world. For the past 2 years, the curriculum and working patterns have been overturned in response to this epidemic, which has brought unprecedented challenges and physical and mental stress to preschool teachers. This situation can have a drastic impact on the acquisition of job well-being for preschool teachers. During this special time, the leader's management style will also influence the psychological feelings of the organization's staff. For example, empowering leadership is an important management function that empowers subordinates, emphasizes the meaning of work, promotes participation in decision-making, and expresses confidence. Therefore, in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, it is worthwhile to explore the topic of empowering leadership to ensure preschool teachers' well-being, by balancing work demands and work resources in a way that facilitates a sense of organizational support and reduces job stress, while relatively fewer studies have been conducted on the relationship between preschool teachers' job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this, this study proposed a research model from the theoretical perspective of the Job Demands-Resources Model to explore the influence of empowering leadership, sense of organizational support, and job stress on preschool teachers' job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the purpose of this study, a convenience sampling method was used to invite 500 preschool teachers in China to complete a questionnaire survey, and after removing invalid samples and data with incomplete answers, reliability and validity analyses and model fit tests were conducted, followed by a structural equation modeling method for path analysis. The results of the study showed that (1) in the kindergarten work context, empowering leadership showed a significant negative effect on job stress, but a significant positive effect on job well-being and a significant positive effect on sense of organizational support. (2) Sense of organizational support had a significant negative effect on job stress but a significant positive effect on preschool teachers' job well-being. (3) Preschool teachers' job stress and job well-being showed a significant negative effect. The contribution of this study was to explore the relationship between understanding leadership empowerment and preschool teachers' job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, which will facilitate educational organizational contexts to empower preschool teachers to work harder to reduce their job stress as well as enhance their sense of organizational support and promote the acquisition of job well-being.
21世纪20年代初的新冠疫情给全球教育工作者带来了巨大影响。在过去的两年里，课程设置和工作模式因这场疫情而被颠覆，这给幼儿教师带来了前所未有的挑战以及身心压力。这种情况会对幼儿教师工作幸福感的获得产生巨大影响。在这个特殊时期，领导者的管理方式也会影响组织员工的心理感受。例如，授权型领导是一项重要的管理职能，它赋予下属权力，强调工作的意义，促进参与决策，并表达信任。因此，在当前新冠疫情背景下，探讨授权型领导这一话题以确保幼儿教师的幸福感是值得的，即通过平衡工作需求和工作资源，以促进组织支持感并减轻工作压力，但关于新冠疫情背景下幼儿教师工作幸福感之间关系的研究相对较少。基于此，本研究从工作需求-资源模型的理论视角提出了一个研究模型，以探讨在新冠疫情背景下，授权型领导、组织支持感和工作压力对幼儿教师工作幸福感的影响。为实现本研究目的，采用便利抽样法邀请中国500名幼儿教师完成问卷调查，在剔除无效样本和回答不完整的数据后，进行了信效度分析和模型拟合检验，随后采用结构方程建模方法进行路径分析。研究结果表明：（1）在幼儿园工作情境中，授权型领导对工作压力有显著负向影响，但对工作幸福感有显著正向影响，对组织支持感有显著正向影响。（2）组织支持感对工作压力有显著负向影响，但对幼儿教师的工作幸福感有显著正向影响。（3）幼儿教师的工作压力和工作幸福感呈显著负向影响。本研究的贡献在于基于工作需求-资源模型，探讨了新冠疫情背景下理解领导授权与幼儿教师工作幸福感之间的关系，这将有助于教育组织情境中授权幼儿教师更加努力工作，以减轻他们的工作压力，增强他们的组织支持感，并促进工作幸福感的获得。
