Browsing by Author "Manninen, Ursula"

Teacher’s wellbeing at work has been studied a lot and research has shown that teachers’ occupational wellbeing is better than employees’ in other professions. However, teachers have been found to experience more stress than those who work in other professions. Many occupational wellbeing studies have found five factors that affect wellbeing at work. These factors are organization, management, work community, work, and the individual and his or her characteristics and interpretation of his or her own workplace. The purpose of this thesis is to find out what kind of factors increase and burden teachers' occupational wellbeing. The aim is also to examine if I could find the five factors that Manka has mentioned in her studies in this material or are there some other factors that affect wellbeing at work but are not in this model of occupational wellbeing. Research questions were: ”What kind of factors have been found to affect teachers’ wellbeing at work?” and ”How well does the Manka's well-being model reflect the factors affecting the wellbeing of teachers in this thesis?”. Research method was a systematic literature review and the material used in this thesis was gathered from Helsinki University Library’s search engine called Finna using various search terms. The thesis was limited to the recent studies about Finnish teachers in kindergartens, schools and adult education institutions. In this thesis, the most recent studies were limited to the years 2015−2018. The search engine showed 159 searches but only the most relevant articles were considered. In the end there were 18 relevant studies. The most prominent factors that increase teachers’ occupational wellbeing were communality and the sense of belonging. These were found to help people understand and trust each other, and to promote the teacher's sense of self-efficacy. The interaction between students and teachers could have a negative effect on teachers' well-being at work if teachers had distant relationships with their students. Distant relationships were more likely related to teacher’s burnout experiences. Workplace bullying was found to be more common in Finland than in other European countries. Bullying caused harm to the harassed person and to the workplace, for example through mental disorders, increased absenteeism, and rising sickness costs. The material used in this thesis matched only partially up to the general occupational well-being model. The impact of the work community was most clearly seen as a factor affecting well-being at work. Management, organization and the employee itself were found to have factors that influenced on well-being at work but the impact of the work did not appear in this material at all.