Development and empirical evaluation of an intention to quit structural model for teachers in South Africa

[摘要] ENGLISH SUMMARY : Teaching is eroding teachers' attitudes, health and spirit. Teachers in South Africa are facinghigh levels of anxiety, depression, job dissatisfaction, lower quality of life and increased absenteeism (Jackson & Rothman, 2005). Burnout, stress and exhaustion are common complaints and are most likely due to insufficient resources and high demands (for example: role overload, unmanageable class sizes, violence in classrooms and cuts in government funding) faced by teachers (Jackson et al., 2005). In 2002 is was reported that there are more South African teachers leaving the profession than entering it, highlighted the problem of teacher retention (Xaba, 2003). The overarching aim of this study was, therefore, to develop a nomological network of variables which accounts for variance in ITQ in teachers to betterunderstand this phenomenon.This study used the premise of the Job Demands-Resources theory (Demerouti & Bakker, 2011) to derive a structural model to explicate the psychological mechanism deriving public school teachers' intention to quit levels in Kwa-Zulu Natal. The study included proactive personality (measured using the Proactive Personality scale by Claes, Beheydt, & Lemmens, 2005), negative and positive work-home and home-work interference (measured with the Survey Work-home Interference Nijmegen, de Klerk & Mostert, 2010), burnout (operationalised with the Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey, Maslach & Schaufeli, 2001), engagement (Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-9, Schaufeli & Bakker, 2003) and intention to quit (the Turnover Intention Scale-3, Cohen, 1993). An ex post facto correlational design with a convenience sample of 135 Kwa-Zulu Natal public school teachers was used.The Partial Least Squares approach was used to analyse the fit of the structural (inner) and measurement (outer) model of this study. Seven out of the ten hypothesised paths contained in the model were found to be significant.The overall model results showed that burnout is the strongest predictor of intention to quit for teachers. A lack of engagement was found to predict intention to quit, but not as strongly asburnout. Furthermore, burnout was more strongly predicted by negative work-home/homework interference than proactive personality, while proactive personality was found to be a moderate predictor of engagement. These results helped formulate recommendations to school management as well as the Department of Education in the form of interventions aimed specifically at reducing intention to quit levels of teachers in public schools.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University