Work motivation in teachers with professional burnout

Abstract

Professional burnout of teachers is a widespread problem all over the world. The percentage of ‘burned-out’ teachers ranges from 3–5% to 65–75% in different countries. These statistics highlight the importance of studying professional burnout, its contextual causes, psychological predictors, and its impact on both the psychological well-being of a teacher and the quality of the teacher’s work. As motivational factors play an essential role in the performance of job duties and in making the psychological efforts required to carry out professional activity, our study seeks to identify the relationship between the work motivation of teachers and the level of their professional burnout. The study involved 1 054 teachers working at education institutions of different specializations and levels of education. The methods included the Work Motivation Inventory by C. Zamfir (adapted by A. Rean) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (adapted by N. Vodopyanova). It was found that 19.8% of teachers who took part in the study had all three symptoms of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduction of personal achievements. Comparison of ‘burned-out’ teachers with the rest of the sample revealed statistically significant work motivation differences in two indicators: the internal and external positive motivation is higher in the conditionally normative group of teachers (t=-7.8 at p<0.001 and t=-2.5 at p=0.012 respectively). We conducted Pearson correlation analysis separately in each of the groups of teachers (the teachers were divided into groups based on their professional burnout scores) and found differences in the interrelations between work motivation and burnout symptoms. In the group of ‘burned-out’ teachers, there are only inverse statistically significant correlations of all burnout symptoms with internal motivation. In the conditionally normative group, there is inverse correlation of emotional exhaustion and reduction of professional achievements with intrinsic motivation, there is inverse correlation of reduction of professional achievements with external positive motivation, and there is direct correlation between emotional exhaustion and external negative motivation. The obtained results can be used for preventive work in the framework of psychological support in education.