Purpose The actions of school leaders engender working conditions that can play a role in positively (or negatively) affecting teachers’ motivation, well-being or professional practice. The purpose of this paper is to explore how leader actions might bring about positive teacher outcomes through meeting teachers’ psychological needs at three distinct levels: the intrapersonal, interpersonal and organizational. Design/methodology/approach Using a sample of over 1,500 teachers from 73 schools in a large, high-poverty, urban Midwestern school district, the authors applied a multilevel path analysis to the study of the relationships between the intrapersonal, interpersonal and organizational dimensions of teacher psychological needs and the teacher affective states of burnout, organizational commitment and intent to leave the school and/or profession. Findings Whereas the intrapersonal dimension works primarily through burnout, the findings suggest that the interpersonal dimension (teacher–principal interactions) primarily functions to cultivate organizational commitment among teachers. At the organizational level, cultivating a trusting, enabling work environment where teachers can build on existing knowledge and skills had a demonstrated relationship to collective teacher burnout and organizational commitment, but only to the degree that these actions serve to build collective teacher efficacy. Practical implications In addressing existing deficits in support for teachers’ psychological needs within a school, school leaders have a significant mechanism through which to affect the attitudes and emotions of teachers which precede turnover behavior. However, addressing teacher psychological needs should be thought of as multidimensional – no single dimension (either the intrapersonal, interpersonal or organizational) alone will be sufficient. Principals should expect to work both one-on-one as well as collectively with teachers to address school working conditions which support their psychological needs as learners. Originality/value Prior studies examining the various working conditions of schools have included many common constructs, but the authors demonstrate how self-determination theory could be used to unify these seemingly unique characteristics of school working conditions with respect to how they support (or thwart) the psychological needs of teachers. The authors also empirically test the relationship of these dimensions to a wide-range of commonly-used teacher affective outcomes.

Currently, a significant number of states are in the process of implementing a high-stakes teacher evaluation (HSTE) system. In many ways, Louisiana’s teacher evaluation system, Compass, is typical of the models that many states have adopted. This article reports the experiences of 37 elementary teachers from five districts across Louisiana after their first 2 years under this system. It is through the multiple lenses of teacher support, autonomy, self-efficacy, and satisfaction that we sought to understand how Compass has shaped teachers’ motivation for improvement as well as their continued commitment to the teaching profession. Analysis of longitudinal interview data reveals a widespread lack of support for change in the form of self-efficacy building experiences—particularly vicarious experiences—for teachers. As a result, many teachers experienced, by the second year, significant negative arousal events and profound losses of satisfaction and commitment to the profession—this despite most being rated as “highly effective.”

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Teacher satisfaction is a key affective reaction to working conditions and an important predictor of teacher attrition. Teacher evaluation as a tool for measuring teacher quality has been one source of teacher stress in recent years in the United States. There is a growing body of evidence on how to evaluate teachers in ways which support their growth and development as practitioners. For this study, we inquired: What is the relationship between supportive teacher evaluation experiences and U.S. teachers’ overall job satisfaction? To answer this question, we employed a multilevel regression analysis to multiply-imputed data on U.S. lower-secondary teachers’ experiences from the 2013 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). We found a small, positive relationship between the perceptions of supportive teacher evaluation experiences and U.S. secondary teachers’ satisfaction after controlling for other important teacher and school characteristics and working conditions. Further, teachers who felt their evaluation led to positive changes in their practice had higher satisfaction. Teachers whose primary evaluator was a fellow teacher as opposed to the principal also had higher satisfaction on average. We discuss the implications of these findings for school leaders as well as future teacher evaluation policy.

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