This study examines the relationship among job stress, job satisfaction, and willingness to leave the job of private tutoring instructors while trying to find out the mediation effect of job satisfaction when job stress has a direct and indirect impac...
This study examines the relationship among job stress, job satisfaction, and willingness to leave the job of private tutoring instructors while trying to find out the mediation effect of job satisfaction when job stress has a direct and indirect impact on the teachers' willingness to quit. The main aim of this study is to understand what makes private tutoring instructors stressed out and help their job satisfaction level improve so that more of them can stay in their current jobs.
To this end, the author conducted a survey on 335 teachers working in private after-schools including supplementary "cram" schools, college entrance exam prep schools, and English language schools across the country. Of these, the author discarded 16 responses due to incomplete answers and used 309 questionnaire sheets for analysis. The data were processed through the SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 18.0 statistical packages. In order to find out the relational structure among variables, the author set up a model with paths by which job stress of the teachers affects their intention to quit indirectly through the mediation of job satisfaction and attempted an analysis of the structural equation model. In addition, the author looked at the mediation effect of job satisfaction when their job stress affects their willingness to leave their job through Bootstrap.
The results of the analysis are as follows: First, the higher the degree of stress suffered by the private tutoring instructors the lower their job satisfaction level. Of the variables measuring the degree of job stress including relational strife, inadequate compensation, and uninspiring workplace culture, all exhibited a statistically significant negative correlation with the variables representing job satisfaction level. In particular, the stress in relation to uninspiring workplace culture turned out to affect the teachers' job satisfaction most. Second, there was a statistically significant negative correlation between the teachers' job satisfaction level and their intention to leave the job. Third, the higher the teachers' stress level gets, the more likely they want to quit and look for other occupations. All the variables measuring the degree of job stress including relational strife, inadequate compensation, and uninspiring workplace culture indirectly had a positive correlation with the willingness to leave while only the inadequate compensation variable turned out to have directly and positively impacted the teachers' willingness to leave.
Fourth, it was found that workplace stress of the teachers had a positive impact on their intention to leave through the full mediation of job satisfaction. The variables affecting the teachers' stress level including relational strife, inadequate compensation, and uninspiring workplace culture have an indirect impact on their willingness to leave through the path of work stress, job satisfaction, and willingness to leave, which implies that the variables' effects were indirect, rather than direct, through the full medium of job satisfaction.
From these results, one can conclude that the most critical factor that influences the decision for the teachers to stay or quit is job satisfaction, which in turn is determined by work-related stress level. In order to reduce the high turnover rate among private tutoring instructors, it is necessary to find out the sources of stress in the workplace and eliminate or alleviate such factors physically or emotionally.