Job-related Stress and Well-being Among Teachers: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract

Teachers are believed to be a profession which brings relatively high job satisfaction as well as high level of stress in their job settings because of various reasons such as heavy workload, long teaching hours, large class size, students’ disciplinary problems, cramped classrooms, excessive administrative work and so on. To examine what the main stressors are and whether gender and teaching experiences will make a difference on how teachers perceive job-related stress, this study has designed a questionnaire called Stress and Job Satisfaction Scale for Teacher (SJSST) to explore the issues. Results showed that school teachers faced moderate level of job-related stress. The main stressors were ‘demands from job’, ‘work-life balance’ and ‘control over work’. It was also found that male teachers had higher level of stress in general. ‘Psychosocial work environment’, ‘health & well-being’, and ‘relations at work’ were found to have significant difference between male and female teachers. According to the results of ANOVA, years of teaching experience were significant for all stressors. Teachers with more than 30 years of teaching experience received highest level of stress from ‘demands from job’ and ‘work-life balance’ among other groups of teachers. Teachers with 11-20 years of experience had highest level of stress from ‘control over work’ and ‘psychosocial work environment’. While teachers with 6-10 years of experience, they suffered highest level of stress from ‘health and well-being’, ‘future and change’, ‘relations at work’, and ‘physical environment’.