Trust in school: a pathway to inhibit teacher burnout?
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-02-2014-0018 |
| Date | 02 February 2015 |
| Published date | 02 February 2015 |
| Pages | 93-115 |
| Author | Dimitri Van Maele,Mieke Van Houtte |
| Subject Matter | Education,Administration & policy in education,School administration/policy |
Trust in school: a pathway to
inhibit teacher burnout?
Dimitri Van Maele and Mieke Van Houtte
Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to consider trust as an important relational source in schools
by exploring whether trust lowers teacher burnout. The authors examine how trust relationships with
different school parties such as the principal relate to distinct dimensions of teacher burnout. The
authors further analyze whether school-level trust additionally influences burnout. In doing this, the
authors account for other teacher and school characteristics.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors use quantitative data gathered during the 2008-2009
school year from 673 teachers across 58 elementary schools in Flanders (i.e. the northern
Dutch-speaking region of Belgium). Because teacher and school characteristics are simultaneously
related to burnout, multilevel modeling is applied.
Findings –Trust can act as a buffer against teacher burnout. Teachers’trust in students demonstrates the
strongest association with burnout compared to trust in principals or colleagues. Exploring relationships
of trust in distinct school parties with different burnout dimensions yield interesting additional insights
such as the specific importance of teacher-principal trust for teachers’emotional exhaustion. Burnout is
further an individual teacher matter to which school-level factors are mainly unrelated.
Research limitations/implications –Principals fulfill an important role in inhibiting emotional
exhaustion among teachers. They are advised to create a school atmosphere that is conducive for
different kinds of trust relationships to develop. Actions to strengthen trust and inhibit teacher
burnout are necessary, although further qualitative and longitudinal research is desirable.
Originality/value –This paper offers a unique contribution by examining trust in different school
parties as a relational buffer against teacher burnout. It indicates that principals can affect teacher
burnout and prevent emotional exhaustion by nurturing trusting relationships in school.
Keywords Teachers, Burnout, Belgium, Trust, Emotional exhaustion, Elementary school
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Burnout is a crucial construct in understanding job-related stress processes and
has been identified as an important predictor of employee turnover. In addition, the
literature indicates that burnout contributes to employees’intentions to quit the
job across different organizational settings, including teaching (Chang, 2009; Cordes
and Dougherty, 1993; Jackson et al., 1986; Maslach et al., 2001). Burnout therefore
contributes to teacher attrition, which is currently considered as an important
educational challenge worldwide (Cha and Cohen-Vogel, 2011; Kukla-Acevedo, 2009;
Keigher, 2010). In Flanders (i.e. the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium) where
the present study has been conducted, the educational system is challenged by a high
number of retiring teachers and by a substantial percentage of beginning teachers who
leave the profession. For example, 14 percent of the teachers in elementary education
and 22 percent in secondary education leave the profession within the first five years
(Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, 2013). In counterbalancing educational
issues related to teacher turnover, the topic of retaining teachers has received broad Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 53 No. 1, 2015
pp. 93-115
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/JEA-02-2014-0018
Received 1 February 2014
Revised 19 June 2014
25 August 2014
8 September 2014
Accepted 9 September 2014
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
This study has been made possible through a grant from the Research Foundation –Flanders
(Project G.040908).
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Trust in
school
scholarly attention (e.g. Guarino et al., 2006; Müller et al., 2009) −attention that
is welcome because a direct and negative effect of teacher turnover on student
achievement has recently been demonstrated across a large-scale empirica l study
(Ronfeldt et al., 2013). In order to keep teachers in their job, those who manage the
teaching profession should therefore understand which factors contribute to attrition-
inducing job attitudes such as burnout.
The general aim of the study is to investigate whether teachers’trust in other parties
at school such as the principal or colleagues antecedes burnout. Exploring antecedents
of job burnout necessitates a focus on social relationships within the work environment
because burnout is mainly considered a prolonged response to interpersonal stress ors
in the job (Maslach et al., 2001). Across organizational settings, the nature of social
relationships may indeed expand, or reduce an employee’s capacity for managing
workplace stress (Freeney and Fellenz, 2013; Karasek et al., 1982). For teachers,
involvement in the social system of the school is an inherent aspect of the job because
they are dependent on their interactions with other school members to be successful in
accomplishing their teaching goals (see Bryk and Schneider, 2002; Forsyth et al.,
2011; Nias, 2005). This relational interdependence explains why trust can be viewed as
a key characteristic of teachers’social relationships within the complex work
environment of the school, one that supports teacher and school effectiveness (Forsyth
et al., 2011; Van Maele et al., 2014). Trust is an essential characteristic of stable social
relationships (Blau, 1986) and in situations of interdependence it reduces uncertainty
and enhances cooperation (see Gambetta, 1988; Luhmann, 1979; Rousseau et al., 1998).
Trust might accordingly affect teachers’state of mind in doing their job. To be sure, as
a teacher being dependent on other school parties to accomplish your teaching goals
but at the same time not being able to trust those parties is not conducive to the
development of positive job attitudes.
Seeking to expand previous studies, which have demonstrated the importance of
trust for teachers’job attitudes, and role performance (e.g. Lee et al., 2011; Price, 2012;
Tschannen-Moran, 2009; Van Maele and Van Houtte, 2012), we consider the role of trust
in explaining teachers’level of job burnout. Although there has recently been light shed
on a trust-burnout association in teaching (e.g. Dworkin and Tobe, 2014; Timms et al.,
2007), it still remains unexplored how trust in specific (groups of) school members,
at multiple levels, relate to specific dimensions of teacher burnout. Our study therefore
adds two salient contributions to the extant research. First, it considers teachers’trust
in various school parties (principals, students, or colleagues) and how that trust
associates with distinct components of teacher burnout, namely, emotional exhaustion,
depersonalization, and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment (see Maslach et al.,
2001). Second, not only can trust be viewed as an individual teacher feature but also
as a collective faculty feature, i.e. faculty trust. Faculty trust is regarded as an
organizational school property and is usually approached by taking the average leve ls
of trust as perceived or experienced by the faculty (see Forsyth et al., 2011; Van Maele
et al., 2014). We additionally investigate whether the level of faculty trust affects
teacher burnout above and beyond a possible influence of individual teacher trust
because both individual and organizational characteristics have been indicated as
anteceding employee burnout (Maslach et al., 2001).
In paying attention to how trust in distinct school parties at both the teacher
and faculty level relate to distinct components of teacher burnout, the present
study contributes in a unique way to both the literature that deals with the importance
of trust in schools (e.g. Adams and Forsyth, 2013; Bryk and Schneider, 2002;
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