Exploring the Role of Job Crafting, Neuroticism, and Resilience in Teacher Burnout and Work Engagement: A Mediation Analysis

Abstract

According to Tims et al. (2015), job crafting is a prospective workplace strategy employees use to enhance their mental well-being. It includes employees taking the initiative to adapt features of their jobs to create a more fulfilling and engaging work experience. The study inspected the implication of job crafting in various workplace settings and aimed to know if behavioural and cognitive job crafting mediate the relationship between neuroticism and resilience with burnout and work engagement. The data was obtained from 76 respondents with a mean age of M = 46.63 (11.91). Self-report measures were used to measure neuroticism, resilience, burnout, work engagement and job crafting. Correlation, hierarchical linear regression, and mediation analysis were used to assess the study variables' direct and indirect effects. The study results indicated that job crafting had a significant positive association with work engagement. Furthermore, job crafting was positively associated with burnout but statistically insignificant, contrary to the hypothesis. Moreover, resilience had a significant positive association with cognitive job crafting but not with behavioural job crafting. Furthermore, neuroticism had an insignificant negative association with cognitive job crafting and an insignificant positive association with behavioural job crafting. Similarly, there was no mediating effect of job crafting on the relationship between neuroticism and work engagement and between resilience and work engagement among school teachers. However, in mediation analysis, resilience had a significant negative direct relationship with burnout, indicating that highly resilient individuals tend to have less burnout. Similarly, neuroticism had a significant positive relationship with burnout, indicating that individuals who were high in neuroticism were more likely to burnout. Given the limitation of this study, further research should be done to understand the implications of job crafting in education. The practical implication of the study is that not all kinds of job-crafting behaviour are suitable in education settings and need more coping strategies to mitigate stress.