Engagement and emotional exhaustion in teachers: Does the school context make a difference?

Abstract

Focusing on the teaching profession, this study examines the association between school-specific demands and resources, on the one hand, and engagement and exhaustion, on the other. Individual-level data obtained from 1,939 secondary teachers as well as school-level data from their principals and students, based on 198 German schools, were subjected to multilevel analysis. School-level characteristics accounted for only a small amount of the variance in teachers' emotional exhaustion. In contrast, teachers' engagement differed considerably between schools. For the two outcome variables, engagement and exhaustion, specific patterns of predictive effects were observed at the school level: when controlling for individual teacher characteristics, the principal's support in educational matters predicted higher levels of engagement, whereas disciplinary problems in the classroom predicted higher emotional exhaustion. Although school-level data were associated with engagement and exhaustion, results suggest paying particular attention to individual differences between teachers that might predispose them to develop either more engagement or emotional exhaustion. © 2008 The Authors.