Enabling School Bureaucracy, Psychological Empowerment, and Teacher Burnout: A Mediation Analysis

Abstract

Teacher burnout is a psychological phenomenon affecting teachers’ effectiveness and wellbeing across the globe. Thus, education researchers have investigated its antecedents to identify approaches to alleviate teacher burnout. However, many of the existing studies tend to underline the effects of psychological factors but overlook the effects of structural factors on teacher burnout. Thus, the aim of this study is to fill the research gap by investigating how teacher burnout is affected by enabling school bureaucracy as a structural factor and psychological empowerment as a psychological factor based on empowerment theory. By using the self-administrated questionnaire survey, the study investigated 322 primary and secondary schoolteachers from China. It finds that structural empowerment and psychological empowerment are negatively associated with teacher burnout. Moreover, the relationship between structural empowerment and teacher burnout was mediated by psychological empowerment, especially its dimensions of meaning and competence.