The Impact of Both Individual and Collaborative Job Crafting on Spanish Teachers’ Well-Being

Abstract

Current changes in social structures and political-economic systems directly affect teachers’ job performance. Among others, these changes include changes in communication and information technologies, the scientific revolution, changes in the structure of populations, the revolution of social relations, economic and political transformations, and revolutions in labor relations and leisure time. These changes all seem to have promoted educational revolutions, which encourage the development of autonomous individuals who are capable of making critical judgments, ready to dialogue and cooperate in problem solving, and who seek alternatives aimed at building a better society. Thus, teachers suffer daily from the impact of continual changes that affect the way they do their work. According to the job-demands resources model, each job environment has its own characteristics that can be grouped into two dimensions: job demands and job resources. However, the relationship between job demands and resources has serious implications for individuals’ lives and psychological well-being. While work provides us with the means to survive, develop social relationships, and experience control over our lives, an excess of demands and a shortage of resources to cope with them would adversely affect personal well-being. Hence, individuals can perform behaviors through job crafting to balance this relationship between demands and resources at work. Job crafting is a proactive behavior of the worker who improves his own working conditions in order to achieve a more meaningful and satisfactory job. This phenomenon allows individuals to play a certain role by “creating” their own job, changing the conditions in which they perform their tasks. In this study, 146 teachers participated to investigate the relationships between both individual and collaborative job crafting behaviors, on the one hand, and job satisfaction, work engagement, and teaching performance, on the other.

Understanding Teacher Wellbeing Through Job Demands-Resources Theory

“…Early conceptualisations of the JD-R theory assumed that employees had little control over working conditions, which were considered to be established by employers and organisations (Bakker and Demerouti 2017). However, longitudinal tests of JD-R theory have found that employees often make proactive changes to optimise their workplace experiences (e.g., by actively seeking challenges, mobilising job resources, and finding ways to manage their job demands; Alonso et al 2019;Tims et al 2013). This process, referred to as job crafting, is an example of the way in which JD-R theory can be practically applied to enhance teacher wellbeing.…”

Leader-member exchange fosters nurses’ job and life satisfaction: The mediating effect of job crafting

“…Job satisfaction can be improved by job crafting as people can redefine their job to meet their needs and increase the applicability, meaning, and purpose of their work [ 11 , 19 ]. Recently, some scholars have indicated that individual and collaborative job crafting positively influences the job satisfaction of hotel employees and teachers [ 29 , 32 , 33 ]. The author indicated that job crafting has a significant positive impact on job and life satisfaction [ 34 ].…”

An Opportunity to Grow or a Label? Performance Appraisal Justice and Performance Appraisal Satisfaction to Increase Teachers’ Well-Being

“…On the other, many difficulties may arise, such as lack of time, lack of confidence, or lack of training (Donaldson and Mavrogordato, 2018). Since well-being is conceptualized as a self-realization, as a social integration and as positive orientation toward the task, job satisfaction, life satisfaction and job performance are often used as its indicators (Alonso et al, 2019). Teachers’ performance appraisal aims to be an objective system evaluating teachers and teaching through a supervisors’ analysis.…”

“…Work context and life domain are not distinct spheres: they are interdependent and could influence each other in many ways (Chummar et al, 2019). Then, we would like to take a further step: to explore the relation between performance appraisal justice and life satisfaction, which is often used as an indicator of well-being (Alonso et al, 2019). Life satisfaction is a cognitive evaluation regarding how satisfying our entire life is (Hart, 1999).…”