engleski

The relationship between teachers' work orientations and wellbeing: mediating effects of work meaningfulness and occupational identification

Recent studies in the field of positive psychology suggest that there is a connection between the teachers’ well-being and the performance of their students. Since the well- being of teachers is obviously an important factor for their effectiveness, it would be worth finding out what contributes to the teachers’ well-being. Following this line of thought, the aim of this study was to assess the relationship between teachers’ work orientations (job, career and calling orientation) and their well-being (life satisfaction, flourishing and job satisfaction), with possible mediating effects of work meaningfulness and occupational identification. The following measures were administered to 249 primary school teachers in the Zagreb region: Work-life questionnaire (Wrzesniewski et al., 1997), Work Meaningfulness scale (Bunderson & Thompson, 2009), Occupational Identification scale (Mael & Ashforth, 1992), Flourishing Scale – FS (Diener, et al. 2010), The Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) with the addition of a one-item assessment of job satisfaction. The structural equations modeling was used to analyze the data. The results suggested that the calling orientation was directly positively and job orientation directly negatively linked to well-being. The career orientation was not linked to the well- being in any way. In addition to that, the mediation analysis performed with bootstrapping method showed that meaningfulness of work and occupational identification were significant mediators between work orientations and well- being. The relationship between the calling orientation and wellbeing was completely mediated by afore mentioned variables, while the relationship between the job orientation and well-being was partially mediated by these variables. It was concluded that the calling orientation can lead to higher levels of work meaningfulness and occupational identification which in turn positively affects wellbeing. On the other hand, job orientation (work as a mean of financial security) leads to lower levels of work meaningfulness and occupational dentification, and consequently to lower levels of well-being

work orientations ; work meaningfulness ; occupational identification ; well-being

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