Pikić Jugović Ivana, Marušić Iris, Matić Bojić Jelena
Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Centre for Educational Research and Development, Zagreb, Croatia.
BMC Psychol. 2025 Jan 6;13(1):9. doi: 10.1186/s40359-024-02323-2.
Teacher well-being has increasingly become a prominent research topic due to its significant impact on various teacher and student outcomes. This focus is particularly crucial for early career teachers, who often encounter numerous challenges at the beginning of their careers, leading to elevated levels of stress and burnout. Our study aimed to examine the relationship between social and emotional competencies and burnout of early career teachers and the potential mediating role of teacher self-efficacy in this relationship. A total of 657 Croatian subject teachers with up to 5 years of experience participated in the study. Structural equation modelling was implemented to test models of hypothesised relations for the overall burnout as a dependent variable and for each burnout dimension: exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment. Tested models singled out self-management and social awareness as two social and emotional competencies that are, along with teacher self-efficacy, particularly predictive of burnout. Self-management predicted lower overall burnout and teacher self-efficacy partially mediated this relationship. Social awareness also predicted lower burnout in teachers, but this relationship was fully mediated by teacher self-efficacy. Early career teachers who are better at managing and motivating themselves, who are socially aware and behave more prosocially were feeling more efficacious as teachers and, subsequently, displayed fewer symptoms of burnout. At the level of burnout dimensions, the overall pattern of relations was mainly retained, indicating that self-management and social awareness are particularly predictive of the four burnout dimensions and that self-efficacy plays a mediating role, either partially or fully, in this relationship. Our findings are especially important in light of the knowledge about early years in teaching being a critical period for teacher career development. They suggest that new teachers could benefit from well-structured mentoring and induction programs designed to ease their transition into schools and foster their well-being in the initial years of teaching.
由于教师幸福感对教师和学生的各种成果具有重大影响，它日益成为一个突出的研究课题。这种关注对于初任教师尤为关键，他们在职业生涯初期经常面临众多挑战，导致压力和职业倦怠水平升高。我们的研究旨在探讨社会和情感能力与初任教师职业倦怠之间的关系，以及教师自我效能感在这种关系中可能起到的中介作用。共有657名教龄不超过5年的克罗地亚学科教师参与了这项研究。采用结构方程模型来检验以总体职业倦怠为因变量以及每个职业倦怠维度（疲惫、心理距离、认知障碍和情感障碍）的假设关系模型。经测试的模型指出，自我管理和社会意识是两种社会和情感能力，与教师自我效能感一起，对职业倦怠具有特别的预测作用。自我管理预示着较低的总体职业倦怠，教师自我效能感部分中介了这种关系。社会意识也预示着教师较低的职业倦怠，但这种关系完全由教师自我效能感中介。在自我管理和激励方面表现更好、具有社会意识且行为更具亲社会性的初任教师，作为教师会感觉更有成效，因此表现出的职业倦怠症状也更少。在职业倦怠维度层面，关系的总体模式基本保持不变，这表明自我管理和社会意识对四个职业倦怠维度具有特别的预测作用，并且自我效能感在这种关系中起到了部分或完全的中介作用。鉴于教学初期是教师职业发展的关键时期这一认识，我们的研究结果尤为重要。它们表明，新教师可以从精心设计的指导和入职培训项目中受益，这些项目旨在帮助他们顺利过渡到学校，并在教学的最初几年促进他们的幸福感。
