one of the reason
that the primary stressors of teachers are the socio-emotional demands of working with more
than 30 students at once, and the fact that teachers have to make hundreds of decisions Bon the
fly^each day (Roeser et al. 2012). In a similar vein, Unterbrink et al. (2012) stated that
teaching-specific stressors are related to classroom management and include the emotional
climate, the dyadic teacher-student relationships, and the interpersonal conflicts with pupils,
parents, or colleagues. Other researchers (McCarthy et al. 2016) suggested that teacher burnout
results from the unbalance between teaching demands (e.g., problematic student behaviors,
administrative demands) and teaching resources (e.g., school support personnel, the existence
of instructional materials.
428 D. ŻOŁNIERCZYK-ZREDA
JOSE 2005, Vol. 11, No. 4
4. DISCUSSION
The study confirmed previous findings that
emotional exhaustion is the easiest symptom to
reduce with various interventions [20, 21, 22,
24, 25]. The components of professional efficacy
and depersonalization were always more difficult
to change with intervention. The short period of
intervention could be the reason for not obtaining
any significant changes in these dimensions of
burnout.
However, a surprisingly great effect of the
intervention concerned perceived behavioural
job control, and a somewhat smaller effect on
perceived workload. It is supposed that the
cognitive and behavioural exercises introduced in
the intervention could substantially help teachers to
increase their authority to make decisions on their
job, to regulate their workload better and finally
to facilitate lowering emotional exhaustion. It was
proven that environmental sense of control is an
important stress management resource. Brouwers
and Tomic [37] also showed that interventions that
incorporate mastery experiences were likely to
reduce teachers’ emotional exhaustion. A similar
outcome concerning increased job control was
obtained in Hatinen et al.’s study [38] after a 2-
week rehabilitation program aimed at enhancing
individual coping resources.
Encouraging teachers to use active, non-
withdrawal coping and respectful, yet assertive
attitudes towards their students has been a very
important part of the intervention. Bakker et
al. [39] suggested, on the basis of their study,
that a positive, active attitude towards one’s
recipients could reinforce their positive, reciprocal
behaviours. It is hypothesized that such reciprocal
students’ behaviours could be the response to the
positive attitude of the teachers participating in
the intervention. According to the equity theory,
emotional burnout and, particularly, emotional
exhaustion, result from lack of reciprocity in
human relations at work [40]. The decrease in
emotional exhaustion observed in the study
suggests that teachers could gain more reciprocity
in the relations with their students as a result of the
training. Future research should also include their
recipients’ assessment.
The decrease in emotional exhaustion was
accompanied by a decrease in subjectively
perceived physical symptoms, and a decrease in
perceived workload. This outcome is in line with
data from Demerouti et al.’s [32] study, which
showed that a high level of job demands is linked
to health impairment.
Although the intervention was not aimed at
any objective manipulation of job conditions, the
perception of job control and job demands changed
significantly due to the intervention. Perhaps
greater changes in all burnout symptoms could
have taken place in this study if the intervention
had focused more on changing the situational and
organizational factors that may play a greater role
in the development of burnout than on individual
ones [2]. Meta-analysis of work stress and burnout
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