ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1647838
This article is part of the Research TopicEducator Burnout – Improving the Understanding of Challenges and Advancing Insights for Interventions and PreventionView all 6 articles
Why Coaching Matters: Exploring the Interplay of Teacher Self-Regulation and Well-Being with a Longitudinal Multigroup Model
Provisionally accepted
- Zurich University of Teacher Education, Zürich, Switzerland
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Self-regulation is considered an important aspect of professional competence that promotes teachers' well-being. It involves controlling thoughts, feelings and actions to pursue goals, deal adaptively with challenges and cope with stress. For early career teachers, these skills are crucial for their health and staying in the profession. However, longitudinal studies which position self-regulation as a personal resource for teachers' well-being remain scarce. The aim of our study was to examine the reciprocal interplay between teachers' self-regulation and well-being (i.e. emotional exhaustion and work engagement), and the impact of self-management training and subsequent professional online coaching on these relations. The study was conducted as part of a professional development course for early career teachers (N = 273), in which the participants were randomly assigned to a standardized training program. Using multigroup structural equation modeling, we compared two treatment groups (training-only, training plus online coaching) with a control group regarding the structural relations. The model comparison revealed significant differences: Self-regulation predicted both work engagement and emotional exhaustion, but only in the group that received training plus coaching. We conclude that self-regulation can serve as an effective personal resource for teachers well-being, under the condition that it is activated as resource and supported. In pursuing challenging goals, coaching may offer crucial support in each phase of the self-regulation process. This longitudinal study contributes to a differentiated view of self-regulation in the field of professional development, and clarifies the conditions under which it serves as an effective individual resource for teachers well being.
Keywords: Teachers' self-regulation, Emotional exhaustion, work engagement, Well-being, coaching, multigroup SEM
Received: 16 Jun 2025; Accepted: 01 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bührer, Wolfgramm, Berweger, Keck Frei and Bieri Buschor. 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: Zippora Bührer, Zurich University of Teacher Education, Zürich, Switzerland
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