If daycare teachers' job satisfaction should fall, they could not demonstrate their ability fully to take care of the younger children. Since daycare teachers must be core factors determining the quality of daycare services, their job satisfaction and...
If daycare teachers' job satisfaction should fall, they could not demonstrate their ability fully to take care of the younger children. Since daycare teachers must be core factors determining the quality of daycare services, their job satisfaction and organizational commitment are more important than any other factor. In 2005, the accreditation system was introduced in order to assure younger children of the professional care and quality services and improve daycare teachers' professionalism. Meanwhile, scholars have argued that the accreditation system would serve to improve daycare teachers' professionalism, employment contract conditions, working conditions, welfare and convenient facilities and retraining to affect their job satisfaction greatly. In contrast, some preceding studies report that the accreditation system burdens daycare teachers with the responsibilities for preparation of complicated and massive documents to make them concentrate less on daycare services, and after all that their job satisfaction would fall.
The purpose of this study was to analyze differences of daycare teachers' job satisfaction and organizational commitment depending on the accreditation system.
For this purpose, the researcher reviewed the existing literature theoretically and thereupon, sampled 388 teachers working for 96 daycare centers in Seoul and Gyeonggi areas for a questionnaire survey about their job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The data collected were processed using the SPSS 12.0 program for reliability test, frequency analysis, T-test and one-way ANOVA. The results of this study can be summarized as follows;
First, as a result of analyzing the differences of daycare teachers' job satisfaction depending on their demographic variables, it was found that the older they were, they were satisfied more with their job, and that the married teachers' job satisfaction was higher than single teachers'. The finding that older teachers were more satisfied with their job may suggest that this group had been more experienced enough to surmount the difficulties of their role play and that they were skilled enough to solve the pending problems.
Second, daycare teachers' job satisfaction differed on such job-related attributes as their career length and operators of daycare centers. Those who had worked for 9 or more years as daycare teachers were most satisfied with their job, while those working for the home daycare facilities were most satisfied with their job, followed by workplace daycare facilities and national/public daycare centers in their order. In general, there were more married teachers than single ones. Since the age gap between married teachers and directors was narrower and since married teachers were more reliable having experience of child-rearing, it was presumed that their job satisfaction was higher. And since workplace and national/public daycare centers were well equipped with the teacher supporting system, their teacher were deemed to be much satisfied with their job.
Third, as a result of analyzing daycare teachers' organizational commitment depending on their demographic variables, it was found that the older they were, they were more committed to their organizations. And their career length was proportional to their organizational commitment, There were found significant differences of their organizational commitment depending on operators of the daycare centers, which was conceived attributable to the same reasons as discussed above for differences of their job satisfaction.
Fourth, as a consequence of surveying daycare teachers for their perception of the effects of the accreditation system, it was disclosed that the accreditation system had served to enhance teachers' professionalism (25.8%), improve quality and quantity of educational materials and instruments (24.3%) and make the indoor spaces cleaner (15.8%).
Fifth, as a result of analyzing differences of daycare teachers' job satisfaction and organizational commitment depending on the accreditation system, it was found that the differences were not significant statistically. Although daycare teachers perceived that the accreditation system had served to improve teachers' professionalism, quality and quantity of educational materials and instruments and indoor environment, it was found that they did not perceive that the accreditation system had not affected their job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Namely, since the accreditation system was found to have no significant effects of daycare teachers' job satisfaction and organizational commitment factors such as their sense of achievement, inter-teacher relationship, daycare services themselves, their professionalism, rewards and working environment, even if it had served to improve such accreditation indices as daycare environment, operation and management of daycare centers, daycare processes, mutual interaction, health and nutrition and safety, it was deemed necessary to divide the job responsibilities among teachers effectively and improve and complement the accreditation system systematically.