Application of Psychological Contract Theory in Mental Health and Professional Development of University Teachers

Abstract

Mental health is an important element of human public health. To investigate the respective causes of and the relationship between effort-reward imbalance and psychological anxiety of university teachers, the author, after making a targeted survey of more than 2000 questionnaires and conducting statistics and analysis of the survey data, discovers that the effort-reward imbalance has a significant effect on the anxiety of university teachers and meanwhile, effort-reward imbalance will indirectly affect the anxiety of university teachers through the breach of psychological contracts and thus directly affect the mental health of university teachers. To solve this problem, the author takes advantage of the psychological contract theory and designs a mental health improvement system for university teachers, that is, to pay more attention to the feeling of effort-reward balance of young university teachers, to give more care and help to teachers who have imbalance feelings, to take the maintenance of psychological contracts as an important starting point of the ideological work of young teachers in universities, and so on. Through the implementation of relevant systems, colleges and universities have effectively strengthened their ability to fulfill contracts, established convenient and unobstructed communication channels, prevented breach of psychological contracts of teachers, and prevented teachers from working at high exhaustion at the cost of their physical and mental health, which can finally improve the job satisfaction and professional development of university teachers and enable them to be devoted to higher education in better health.