ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1609824
This article is part of the Research TopicEducator Burnout – Improving the Understanding of Challenges and Advancing Insights for Interventions and PreventionView all 5 articles
Exploring the influencing effect of tertiary teachers' perceived organizational support and teacher self-efficacy on their job satisfaction: the mediating role of teacher work engagement
Provisionally accepted
- Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanning, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Exploring the influencing effect of tertiary teachers' perceived organizational support and teacher self-efficacy on their job satisfaction: the mediating role of teacher work engagement Teacher job satisfaction has emerged as a central concern in the teaching profession, attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners globally. This research investigates the complex relationships among perceived organizational support, teacher self-efficacy, work engagement, and job satisfaction among tertiary .Using four scalesperceived organizational support, teacher self-efficacy, teacher work engagement and teacher job satisfaction-a survey was conducted among 450 tertiary teachers from public universities in Western China. Participants completed the questionnaires and provided their responses. The findings revealed significant positive correlations between perceived organizational support and work engagement, teacher self-efficacy and work engagement, as well as between perceived organizational support and job satisfaction, and work engagement and job satisfaction. Additionally, a partial mediating effect of work engagement was found in the relationships between perceived organizational support and job satisfaction, and between teacher self-efficacy and job satisfaction.These outcomes contribute to existing theories and offer insights into enhancing teacher satisfaction levels. Recommendations are provided for policymakers, administrators, and teacher education programs to improve teacher satisfaction within professional roles. Furthermore, the study suggests avenues for future research to broaden the understanding of job satisfaction determinants among tertiary educators, including the incorporation of additional cognitive and non-cognitive factors.
Keywords: perceived organizational support, teacher self-efficacy, teacher work engagement, Teacher job satisfaction, tertiary teachers
Received: 23 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mei Chen, Guangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanning, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.