Organizational and Personal Factors in Teachers’ Engagement to Work Activities

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the effects of specific factors on teachers’ work engagement. In particular, it explored the relationships between teachers’ work engagement, work-related resources, work-related demands and their characteristics, such as job position, gender, years of teaching experience, education level and psychological availability. An increasing interest in the way teachers engage in work activities has been recently attributed to accumulating evidence showing the relations of teachers’ beliefs, feelings and behaviors with student outcomes. To this end, 250 out of 370 primary school teachers from 30 primary schools in the Jerusalem educational district answered the questionnaire adopted from previous studies (response rate: 67%). The data obtained were analyzed according to the variables, and the SPSS v. 24 was used to perform a hierarchical multiple regression analysis for the hypotheses of this study. The results revealed that each of the three categories of predictors on work engagement were significant, whereas work-related resources accounted for a significant amount of variance among teachers, especially after taking into account demographic variables. In conclusion, this study underlined that more attention should be paid to ways to improve work-related resources among teachers, in an effort to enhance work-related engagement, thus contributing to the discussion about the predictors of work engagement at schools.