Are Beginning Teachers with a Second Degree at a Higher Risk of Early Career Burnout

This study investigated the impact that holding a second university degree has on levels of burnout that is reported by beginning teachers during their first year of employment. This research formed part of an ongoing investigation that aims to identify important elements relating to teacher well-being during the transition from university to a teaching career. One hundred and twenty three teachers responded to a mail survey six weeks after they commenced fulltime teaching (T1) and again six months later (T2). On both occasions the survey included the Educators Survey version of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI: Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996). Forty five percent of respondents indicated that they held a second university degree in addition to their Bachelor of Education qualification when they registered as a teacher. A between-subjects MANOVA indicated that there were no significant differences in burnout scores between those respondents holding an additional university degree and those who only held the Bachelor of Education degree at T1. However, at T2, a similar analysis indicated that the group of respondents with a second degree had significantly higher burnout levels on two of the three MBI dimensions. These results suggest systematic differences may exist between the two categories of graduates and that these differences may impact on the rate at which burnout develops during the first year of a teaching career. The most widely accepted definition of burnout stems from Maslach's assertion that burnout is “...a three dimensional syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that occurs among individuals who work with people in some helping capacity” (Maslach, 1982, p. 3). Based on a substantial research history spanning the past three decades, several major conclusions about burnout are well accepted. Firstly, burnout, as the chronic end state of an unadaptive response to persistent (job) stress, is an enduring condition for the individual who experiences burnout (Maslach & Goldberg, 1998). Secondly, burnout is directly associated with the manifestation of debilitating symptoms which, over time, lead to significant reductions in the health and well-being of individuals who experience this phenomenon (Cordes & Dougherty, 1993; Kahill, 1988). Thirdly, the detrimental impact that burnout has upon individual workers significantly impacts on the quality of service that is delivered by the organisation employing workers who are burnt out (Cherniss, 1995; Maslach & Leiter, 1997; Maslach & Goldberg, 1998). As further evidence underscoring the significance of these findings for human service workers and the organisations that employ them, burnout is now accepted as a serious health and safety concern in a number of human service professions including teachers. Although the burnout phenomenon has been studied across a wide range of professions, cultures and time frames over the past thirty years, substantial gaps in our knowledge still exist about some of the conditions that can give rise to burnout and how it specifically develops. Whilst it is fairly well accepted that work climate factors, such as a persistently high and unremitting work pressure, lack of social support and work resources, poor role clarity and role conflict will substantially contribute to elevated burnout levels in any work group, there is less certainty about the contribution that other factors may make to elevating or ameliorating burnout. For example, research investigating the contribution that personality traits may make to the explanation of burnout has only been reported relatively recently and there is considerable work to be done to integrate personality into a coherent theory of burnout (Toppinen-Tanner, Kalimo, & Mutanen, 2002). Similarly the effect of a mismatch between an individual’s career aspirations and the reality of work within a profession has been cited as a root cause of burnout (see for example Freudenberger & Richelson, 1980 or Friedman & Faber, 1992) yet further research will be required to firmly establish this hypothesis as fact. In highlighting some of the gaps in the burnout research conducted to date, Toppinen-Tanner et al. (2002) recently proposed that burnout researchers should turn their attention to human service workers who were commencing their careers rather than continue to focus on populations in which burnout has already been established. These authors noted that relatively few studies have undertaken longitudinal investigations to determine the course of burnout, and rarely have populations been studied from the commencement of their career. While burnout within the teaching profession has frequently been investigated and the phenomenon has been well recognised as being problematic for teachers globally, (Cherniss, 1995; Pearce & Molloy, 1990) research involving the teaching profession has also predominantly focused on established populations where burnout could be expected to have been well developed when the investigation commenced (see Elkerton, 1984, Fimian, 1987, and Gold Roth, Wright, & Michael, 1991, for exceptions). In contrast to the prevailing research focus on established teachers, there is widespread recognition of high turnover rates for beginning teachers within the literature, with some researchers reporting turnover as high as 20 to 25% within the first three to five years of employment (Gold, et al., 1991). Given such high early career turnover rates, it can be argued that the failure to specifically focus on beginning teacher cohorts in large scale epidemiological studies of teacher burnout may have underestimated the phenomenon by excluding consideration of teachers who exit their career at an early stage due to burnout. Furthermore, where investigations have been concerned with determining the antecedents of teacher burnout, failure to consider the views of beginning teachers independently of established teachers may have failed to identify risk factors that are most prominent at the commencement of a teaching career. For example, if significant numbers of beginning teachers who perceived their pre-service training in some way as inadequate or problematic go on to leave the profession within the first three years of service, potentially important observations are likely to be obscured by research that does not take a beginning career focus. Some of the earliest research has hypothesised that burnout arises from chronic disappointment arising from the recognition by the worker that their hopes and aspirations for the career they have chosen and worked to enter were not realistic or will not be realised (Fredenberger & Richelson, 1980). Bearing close resemblance to Roger’s existentialist view that distress arises from maintaining substantial mismatches between actual and ideal self image, this view of burnout has found support in the literature describing burnout in teachers (Friedman, 2000). If it is the case that teacher burnout develops, as Friedman asserts, as a result of “the shattered dreams of idealistic workers” (p. 595), perhaps pre-service training directly influences the accuracy of work perceptions that graduates hold when they commence their chosen profession. For example, graduands who have studied in other disciplines such as music, science or economics prior to undertaking their teacher training may, based on their own learning experiences, develop different career expectations to those graduands who complete a four year bachelor of education program that is primarily focused on teaching. Adam’s (1965) equity theory also predicts that differing expectations will arise from different pre-service training programs. This theory postulates that people look to achieve equity with respect to the return on their investments of time and effort. Therefore, equity theory would predict graduands who put more work into achieving their entry level qualification(s) will have higher expectations of their career than graduands who have put less work into achieving their entry level qualifications. This prediction is significant for investigations into burnout, as higher expectations have been linked to higher burnout levels (Freudenberger & Richelson, 1980). To summarize therefore, while sound arguments can be made for why beginning teachers who have undertaken differing university preparations might develop differing pre-service expectations about teaching and this in turn may then give rise to differing rates of burnout, this hypothesis is yet to be tested. The present study will address this hypothesis and investigate whether differing rates of burnout do arise in beginning teachers with different pre-service teacher training backgrounds. Based on the observation that graduands that hold two degrees upon receiving their teacher qualifications and commencing work as teachers have, on average, undertaken a different pre-service training regime than graduands who hold only one degree, the present study has hypothesised that beginning teachers holding two or more university degrees will, on average, develop burnout at a different rate to beginning teachers who only hold the Bachelor of Education at the commencement of their career.