Browsing by Subject "uravaihe"

Teacher burnout has negative consequences on an individual, transactional and organizational levels between teachers and pupils. Compared to other fields, the educational field experiences higher levels of burnout. Previous studies indicate that burnout is connected to turnover, withdrawal, pupils’ motivation, and problems in the working community in addition to the individual’s health. The burnout symptoms have been found to differ in gender, career phase, academic level, socio- economic level of the neighborhood and organization size. Previous research has found that burnout crossover happens from an individual to another across the teacher community. The buffering and exposing attributes concerning the crossover of teacher burnout have been studied rather little. The aim of this research is to discover which individual, transactional and organizational attributes could potentially buffer or expose to the crossover of burnout. Research data was gathered as a part of a wider, national research project called School Matters by the members of the Learning and Development in School research group (Pietarinen, Pyhältö & Soini, 2017). The participants were selected from six different areas. Altogether 1531 teachers from primary, secondary and combined schools completed the questionnaire. The teachers were divided into groups based on their gender, academic level, the level of socio-economic status (SES) of the school neighborhood, career phase and school size. Individual, transactional and organizational factors’ connection to the burnout symptoms were examined through correlations, t-test and One-way analysis of variance. Results indicate that on average the teachers are doing quite well and experience quite moderate levels of burnout. Even so, quite many of them reported higher and lower levels of the symptoms. The symptoms correlate positively with each other. Based on the research findings it can be suggested that individual attributes, including male gender and higher number of years in the profession, buffer from the crossover of burnout. In addition, the higher socio-economic status (SES) of the school neighborhood – a transactional attribute – and smaller school size – an organizational attribute – also act as buffers. On the other hand, exposing attributes include the female gender, less years in the profession, lower socio-economic status of the school neighborhood and large school size. The result may be generalized to the Finnish teaching community as a whole because the research population was large and the geographical distribution of the population was comprehensive.