Hardiness and its role in the stress–burnout relationship among prospective Chinese teachers in Hong Kong

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Abstract

Hardiness, teacher stress and burnout were assessed in a sample of 83 Chinese prospective teachers in Hong Kong. Teachers’ different responses to positively and negatively worded hardiness items suggested positive and negative hardiness reflecting stress resilience and stress vulnerability. Stress, positive hardiness, and negative hardiness all had main, independent and significant impact on emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, whereas only positive hardiness had significant main effect on personal accomplishment. There was only some suggestive evidence to support that negative hardiness mediated slightly the impact of stress on emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and there was no evidence to support that positive hardiness or negative hardiness had stress-buffering effects on teacher burnout. Implications of the findings for preventive interventions to combat stress and avert burnout are discussed.

Introduction

Teacher stress and burnout has increasingly received recognition as a widespread problem and global concern in recent years (e.g., Boyle, Borg, Falzon, & Baglioni, 1995; Borg (1987), Kyriacou, 1987 (2001)). While up to a third of the teachers surveyed in various studies have indicated that they regarded teaching as highly stressful (Borg, 1990), teachers do show marked individual differences in their reactions to different stressors in the teaching profession (Milstein & Farkas, 1988), with some teachers developing more psychological symptoms than others, varying from mild frustration, anxiety, and irritability to emotional exhaustion as well as more severe psychosomatic and depressive symptoms (e.g., Dunham, 1992; Farber (1984a), Farber (1984b); Kyriacou & Pratt, 1985; Kyriacou & Sutcliffe, 1978; Schonfeld, 1992; Seidman & Zager, 1991). In general, the more severe individual negative affective experience has often been described as teacher burnout. In the helping professions, burnout describes the condition of physical and emotional exhaustion, as well as the associated negative attitudes, resulting from the intense interaction in working with people (see, e.g., Bakker, Schaufeli, Sixma, & Bosveld, 2001; Freudenberger, 1974; Maslach, 1986). Maslach and Jackson (1986), for example, have conceptualized burnout as encompassing the tripartite components of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Specifically, emotional exhaustion refers to the feelings of being emotionally drained by intense contact with other people; depersonalization refers to the negative attitude or callous responses toward people; and reduced personal accomplishment refers to a decline in one's sense of competence and of successful achievement in working with people (Maslach, 1986; Maslach & Jackson, 1986). Viewed from this perspective, teacher burnout, if it occurs, should rightly be a great concern, as it might impair the quality of teaching as well as leading to job dissatisfaction, work alienation, physical and emotional ill-health, and teachers leaving the profession. However, while experienced teachers under chronic work stress for some time might be more vulnerable to burnout, novice teachers are not immune to suffering from this condition, as burnout might arise from the great discrepancy between expectations from successful professional performance and an observed dissatisfying reality (see Friedman, 2000; Schonfeld, 2001). Thus, efforts in teacher education to help teachers manage work stress and prevent burnout should target not only experienced or in-service teachers, but also novice, pre-service and prospective teachers.

Before focusing on the design of preventive intervention efforts, questions may be raised as to why some teachers are less impaired or less prone to burnout than others in the face of similar work stress. In this context, studies that examined personal resources and personality moderators of the relationship between stress and health outcomes are relevant. In a seminal study, Kobasa (1979) proposed the construct of hardiness as a personality moderator between stress and health outcomes based on the findings that not all highly stressed business executives fell sick under stress. Hardiness represents a general orientation toward self and the world conceptualized as consisting of a sense of commitment, control, and challenge. Specifically, hardy individuals are committed to what they do in different areas of their lives, believe in having some control over the causes and solutions of problems, and view life changes and adjustment demands as challenges and opportunities. In addition, hardy individuals, compared with their non-hardy counterparts, are said to appraise potentially stressful events more positively, and to be more resistant to potential harmful effects of stress, as hardiness might facilitate transformational (optimistic and active) coping (Kobasa (1979), Kobasa (1982); Maddi & Kobasa, 1984; Ouellette, 1993; Rhodewalt & Agustsdottir, 1984; Rhodewalt & Zone, 1989). It was further suggested that high hardy individuals might more likely engage in approach or problem-focused coping strategies and in behaviors positively associated with health, whereas low hardy individuals might more likely engage in avoidance or emotion-focused coping strategies and behaviors negatively associated with health (William, Wiebe, & Smith, 1992). Although some initial findings have indicated that hardiness could be the result rather than the cause of well-being, and could apply to working men only, similar findings have been found in subsequent studies using a longitudinal design (Wiebe & McCallum (1982), Kobasa (1982)), and with women (Wiebe & McCallum, 1986).

However, studies on the hardiness construct have been criticized (e.g., Carver, 1989; Funk, 1992; Sinclair & Tetrick, 2000). First, the question of whether hardiness should be studied as a unitary or unidimensional construct or as three separate components of commitment, control and challenge remains unresolved. For example, the three components have not been demonstrated to emerge consistently across different samples (Funk & Houston, 1987), and only commitment and control have been shown to be psychometrically adequate and systematically relevant to health outcomes (Hull, Van Treuren, & Virnelli, 1987; Sheppard & Kashani, 1991), raising doubts regarding the construct validity and utility of the three components. On the other hand, the usual practice of reporting a total hardiness score might lead to substantial information loss for understanding how different components of hardiness are related to other constructs (Carver, 1989). In addition, a total additive hardiness score might be inconsistent with the original theoretical position that hardy individuals are defined as being high on all three components, which implies that researchers should examine the components separately or in multiplicative combination (Kobasa, 1979; Ouellette, 1993).

A second concern with studies on hardiness is that available hardiness measures mostly rely heavily on the use of negatively worded items that are similar in content to measures of neuroticism (Allred & Smith, 1989; Funk, 1992; Funk & Houston, 1987; Parkes & Rendall, 1988; Rhodewalt & Zone, 1989). Thus, despite resilience and the positive and adaptive aspects of personality, rather than vulnerability and maladaptive responses, being emphasized in the hardiness construct, the overwhelmingly large proportion of negative items in hardiness measures implies that the absence of non-hardiness rather than the presence of hardiness is assessed. For example, 39 out of the total of 50 items in the Personal Views Survey (PVS; Hardiness Institute, 1988) and 30 out of the total of 45 items in the Dispositional Resilience Scale (DRS; Bartone, Ursano, Wright, & Ingraham, 1989) are negatively worded items for reverse scoring. On the other hand, item wording also bears directly on the emergence of factors defined primarily by either negatively worded items or positively worded items in some factor analytic studies (e.g., Sinclair & Tetrick, 2000). However, rather than regarding the different responses to positive and negative hardiness items as artifactual, Sinclair and Tetrick (2000) hypothesized that separate cognitive processes could be involved in that positive hardiness items might measure stress resilience whereas negatively worded hardiness items might measure stress sensitivity or vulnerability. Thus, a two-factor model separating factors for positive and negative items would lend support to the two-process view of hardiness.

A third concern with hardiness studies is the relative lack of substantial empirical support for the stress-buffering effect of hardiness as originally hypothesized (e.g., Gentry & Ouellette Kobasa, 1984; Hull, Van Treuren, & Virnelli, 1987). Funk (1992), for example, reviewed published studies that specifically tested for buffering effects of hardiness on outcome measures on illness and psychological distress, including burnout and depressive symptoms. While findings from a small number of studies have documented some support, the failure to consistently find moderating effects has led Funk (1992) to conclude that the effects of hardiness on health and psychological distress are predominantly main effects. Nonetheless, whether this observation applies to positive hardiness as well as negative hardiness needs to be further investigated.

In Hong Kong, teacher stress and burnout have received increasing research attention in recent years amid incessant waves of education reform (see Education Commission, 2000). There are increasing number of studies addressing teacher dissatisfaction and turnover (Wong, 1989; Wong & Li, 1995), stressors in teaching and school guidance (Chan, 1998; Chan & Hui, 1998; Hui & Chan, 1996), and teacher burnout (Chan & Hui, 1995; Mo, 1991). Along these lines, this study aimed at expanding the body of findings on teacher stress and burnout through assessing the construct of hardiness and examining its role in the stress–burnout relationships in a sample of Chinese prospective teachers in Hong Kong. Specifically, it was concerned with exploring the dimensionality of the hardiness construct, evaluating the correspondence of these dimensions with constructs of commitment, control, and challenge as well as constructs of positive and negative hardiness, and testing the stress-buffering effects of hardiness on teacher burnout. In addition, the coping strategies of low and high hardy prospective teachers were assessed and compared.

Section snippets

Participants

Eighty-three prospective teachers (23 males and 60 females) enrolled full time in the teacher education program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong participated voluntarily in the study. These student teachers were between the ages of 22 and 42 (M=24.46, SD=3.33). They have all completed their course requirements including training in pedagogy. At the end of their 4-week teaching practice, they were requested to respond to a set of questionnaires assembled in this study to assess their

Results

The item responses of the 83 student teachers to the HS-18 were aggregated and scored. Table 1 shows the item means and standard deviations, and subscale means and standard deviations when items were scored into the commitment, control, and challenge subscales by summing the relevant items. Two overall hardiness scores were also computed by summing the subscores of commitment, control, and challenge to yield the overall hardiness (additive) score, and by multiplying these subscores to yield the

Discussion

The present results extended past findings on the assessment of stress, burnout, and hardiness in non-Chinese settings to Chinese prospective teachers in Hong Kong. Prospective teachers or student teachers in Hong Kong have frequently made comments that teaching was highly stressful after they had their first teaching practice and their actual classroom experience. Casual interviewing with these teachers suggested that there was erosion of the original excitement and a loss of the sense of

Acknowledgments

This study was supported in part by a Chinese University of Hong Kong RGC direct grant for research.

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