The influence of teacher wellbeing, professional development and perceived organizational support on teacher effectiveness: Teacher self-efficacy and resilience as mediators

Previous research demonstrates a wide range of empirical evidences, which leads to teacher effectiveness, pointing towards the contribution of psychological and organizational factors, but mostly conducted separately. The main objective of this study is to test a structural model with teacher self-efficacy and resilience as proposed mediators in the relationship between teacher wellbeing, professional development, perceived organizational support and effectiveness. This study employed a quantitative research method, which includes structural equation model testing. Data were gathered using cross-section approach, from 380 teachers of the secondary schools in Bauchi State, Nigeria. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the hypotheses and the proposed model. The findings indicated that teacher wellbeing directly predicted teacher resilience, self-efficacy and teacher effectiveness; perceived organizational support directly predicted teacher resilience, self-efficacy and effectiveness; while teacher professional development only significantly and directly predicted teacher resilience, but did not predict teacher self-efficacy and effectiveness. It was also found that teacher resilience mediates the relationship between perceived organizational support and teacher effectiveness; and between teacher wellbeing and teacher effectiveness. However, teacher resilience does not mediate the relationship between teacher professional development and teacher effectiveness. Teacher self-efficacy is not a significant mediator of the relationship between any of the exogenous variables, with teacher effectiveness. Theoretically, the study contributes to the literature by concurrently test the two mediators, in identifying the direct and indirect influence of the selected psychological and organizational factors in explicating the variance of teacher effectiveness. Practically, it gives some guidance to all educational stakeholders, particularly in Bauchi State, Nigeria, to consider all the important factors included in the present study, aside from the previous empirical evidences, in making decisions with regard to their efforts towards enhancing teacher effectiveness.