engleski

Does teacher affect mediate the relationship between psychological capital and instructional quality during the COVID-19 pandemic?

During the first lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were especially affected by the sudden and profound changes in their everyday work and ways of delivering instruction. Some teachers, because of their personality characteristics such as psychological capital, could have been more successful in their adaptation during these demanding and stressful times and had more positive affective experiences related to their work. In addition, teachers who possessed greater psychological capital and consequently experienced more positive and less negative affect, might have also performed better. Thus, in this study, guided by the propositions of the affective events theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996), we wanted to explore do teachers’ positive and negative affect experienced in relation to their work mediate the relationship between their general psychological capital and instructional quality in the context of remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 1655 elementary and high school teachers from Croatia participated in the study by approaching to online survey distributed across 227 schools. At the time of data collection, remote teaching has already lasted from five to seven weeks. The results showed that psychological capital directly and positively predicted instructional quality, but also indirectly via positive and negative affect. Higher psychological capital predicted higher positive affect, which, in turn, predicted higher instructional quality. On the other hand, higher psychological capital predicted lower negative affect, which in turn predicted lower teaching quality, but this effect was quite small, and probably significant due to large sample (i.e., good statistical power of the research). The results suggest that psychological capital can be considered as an important psychological resource, which could help teachers in dealing with challenging situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and preserve their emotional well-being and performance.

teachers ; psychological capital ; positive and negative affect ; instructional quality

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