Personality Traits, Technology-Related Teaching Skills, and Coping Mechanisms as Antecedents of Teachers’ Job-Related Affective Well-Being and Burnout in Compulsory and Higher Education Online Teaching Settings

Abstract

Teachers’ job-related well-being has been affected by the sudden shift to emergency remote online teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has totally reshaped the task performance. Therefore, this study attempts to enlighten the possible reasons for the deterioration in teachers’ job-related well-being and proposes an integrated application of three models of prediction for job-related affective well-being and burnout as teachers’ indicators for the well-being in online teaching settings. The first model includes personality traits (extroversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness) measured with the revised neuroticism, extroversion, and openness personality inventory (NEO-PI-R). The second model integrates an indispensable skill for the online teaching which is technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) as technology-related teaching skill conceptualized by the TPACK framework. The TPACK model is a technology integration that identifies three types of knowledge instructors need to combine for successful EdTech integration - technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (i.e., TPACK). The third model, a multidimensional one, includes coping mechanisms (e.g., problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, social support coping, and avoidant coping) as mediators in the relationship between personality traits and TPCK on the one side, and job-related well-being indicators on the other side. Findings from regression analyses were used to test the first two models, and the findings from a mediation analysis were used to test the third model to show that teachers’ TPCK explains a significant amount of variance in the job-related affective well-being of the teachers. The analyses also demonstrate that avoidant coping particularly mediates the relation between burnout and job-related affective well-being during COVID-19 school closures. Results indicate the efficacy of the TPACK model in increasing the job-related well-being of the teachers. The analysis of the data led to recommend that teachers should improve their personal technology-related teaching skills and adopt coping strategies in consistent with their personality traits. Moreover, public schools, as organizations, could advance educational technology programs to enhance technology-related teaching skills with the aim of increasing the well-being of their employees in online teaching settings.

Back to School: Italian Teachers’ Perceptions of the Impact of COVID-19 on Personal and Social Well-Being and Teaching Methods

“…This factor leads us to reflect on the importance of coping strategies that might improve one’s response to an emergency. Indeed, several reports have shown that coping strategies mediate between burnout and well-being in the workplace [ 89 , 90 , 91 ].…”

“…Several studies reveal how important coping strategies are for school administrators and teacher trainers, helping to increase educators’ understanding of work-related stress and its connection with work manageability [ 89 , 90 ].…”

“…Teacher emotion, job satisfaction, and self-efficacy seem to be associated with support absence by school administrators and with a substantial increase in relationship workload due to the need for new teaching methods [ 89 , 90 , 92 ].…”

Teachers’ post-pandemic outlook on the role of Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge in coping with burnout under adverse conditions: How a job demand transformed into a job resource

“…Surprisingly, the findings revealed positive relations between teachers’ previous ICT usage and perceived stress and exhaustion. In another study, Stan (2022) examined the additional value of TPACK in explaining the relation between job burnout and job-related affective well-being over and above personality traits. The result showed that teachers’ TPACK was negatively related to job burnout and positively related to well-being.…”

“…Considering the central role of ICTs in the unprecedented change of face-to-face instruction to online teaching, some technology-related variables including attitudes toward change ( Daumiller et al, 2021 ), previous ICT training ( Stang-Rabrig et al, 2022 ), and Internet/device access and connection quality ( Kamal and Illiyan, 2021 ) have been sparingly examined to shed more light on their contribution to the status of teachers’ mental health during the pandemic. In this framework, very few researchers have shown interest in the interdependence of teachers’ ICT skills and knowledge, job burnout, and coping mechanisms (e.g., Stan, 2022 ), in spite of the fact that technological and pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) has been documented to be related to teachers’ technostress in pre-pandemic studies ( Kay, 2008 ; Joo et al, 2016 ). To address this lacuna in research, the current study assumes a key role for TPACK as one essential resource that can assist teachers in adopting coping strategies to manage their job burnout during the pandemic.…”