Perceived Organizational Stressors And Burnout Among Teachers Of Selected Secondary Girls Schools In Kinta District, Perak

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of educator burnout with four selected organizational stressors: role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload, and lack of administrative support, among secondary school trained teachers with at least one year of instructional experience. The institutions sampled
were all-girls schools situated in and near urban Ipoh. Of the 472 questionnaires distributed, 395 usable sets were returned for analysis. The major result of the study shows that teacher burnout is significantly related to each of the four organizational stressors, with role conflict emerging as the strongest correlate. Individual organizational stressors were also found to significantly explain the variance in burnout. This indicates that role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload, and lack of administrative support can significantly predict burnout among teachers. The results of the findings revealed that when considered in a stepwise multiple regression, only role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload appear to
significantly explain burnout variance, with lack of administrative support appearing to be redundant. The three role-related organizational stressors taken together were found to explain about 50.15% of burnout variance. Lack of administrative support does not seem to contribute unique information about teacher burnout. Three demographic variables: gender, ethnicity and teaching tenure were examined as possible moderators for teacher burnout. Investigation indicated that demographic variables have significant moderating effects on the relationship between burnout and the organizational stressors. After controlling for the demographic variables, it was found that lack of administrative support can significantly explain the variance in burnout, in addition to the role-related stressors. At the same time, ethnicity of the respondents was also found to significantly explain the burnout variance. It appears that with the introduction of demographic variables,
lack of administrative support provides added information on the prediction of teacher burnout. The moderating effect of ethnicity on burnout, and its relationship
to lack of administrative support cannot be explained in the present study. The Teacher Burnout Inventory, which is a modified version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory especially for measuring educator burnout, was found to have a high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = .9067). On factor analyzing, the Teacher Burnout Inventory was found to possess similar three-factor structure as the Maslach Burnout Inventory’s. This implies that the Teacher Burnout Inventory appears to be applicable and replicable for studying educator burnout in Malaysia.