Does Accountability Aggravate the Risk of Teacher Burnout? Evidence from the Chinese Education System.

External and internal accountabilities and emotional labor are possible factors triggering teacher burnout, but the relationships between the constructs have not been fully addressed. Thus, this study aimed to construct and test a chain mediation model to demonstrate the relationships between external accountability and burnout, mediated by internal accountability and emotional labor sequentially. By surveying 814 teachers (years of teaching: M = 13.42, SD = 10.97) from 10 provinces in China, it shows: (1) external and internal accountabilities are both negatively related to burnout; (2) internal accountability, deep acting, and expression of naturally felt emotions mediate the relationship between external accountability and burnout; (3) internal accountability and surface acting sequentially play a chain mediating role between external accountability and burnout; and (4) internal accountability and expression of naturally felt emotions sequentially play a chain mediating role between external accountability and teacher burnout.

Validating the Chinese Version of the Personal Accountability Measure for Assessing Teachers' Perceptions and Experiences of Teacher Accountability in China.

The study aims to validate the Chinese version of Personal Accountability Measure (PAM-Ch), which is used to assess the subjective aspect of teacher accountability, by surveying 1146 teachers enrolled in professional development courses offered by a public university in Beijing. The validation process involved two phases. First, the samples were randomly divided into three subgroups-for subgroup 1 (n = 390), exploratory factor analysis was computed; for subgroup 2 (n = 359), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was computed; and, for subgroup 3 (n = 381), a new CFA was performed for cross-validation. Second, Cronbach's α, composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), maximum shared variance (MSV), and average shared variance (ASV) were calculated for testing the reliability and validity. Throughout the process, three measurement models were tested for the adaptation of the PAM-Ch in this study. The results found that Model 2 was the best fit for the data, whose factor loadings ranged from 0.72-0.95 for internal accountability (factor 1) and 0.75-0.89 for external accountability (factor 2). The CRs of these two factors were 0.963 and 0.916, respectively, and the AVE values were 0.790 and 0.645, respectively, indicating that the PAM-Ch is a reliable and valid measure.

Performance-Based Accountability and Teacher Emotions: Role of Zhongyong Thinking.

Teachers' emotions may be affected by structural reforms of education that emphasizes performance-based accountability (PBA) and by individual psychological processes like thinking style, but there is a lack of research concerning the relationship between the three factors. In this study, thus, we attempted to test the influence of PBA on teacher emotions and to examine whether the relationship was moderated by a zhongyong thinking (ZYT) style in a Chinese context. A sample of 402 primary and secondary schoolteachers from Hubei, Liaoning, and Beijing in China participated in this study. Structural equation modeling was applied to develop moderation models. The results demonstrated that PBA is a singificant factor with respect to teachers' joy, sadness/frustration, anger, and fear, as related to their job of teaching, but not love of their profession. Moreover, the ZYT style may moderate the relationship between PBA and joy.

The Interactional-Institutional Construction of Teachers' Emotions in Hong Kong: The Inhabited Institutionalism Perspective.

This article illustrates the social construction of teachers' emotions by drawing on the emergent sociological perspective of inhabited institutionalism to report on a qualitative research project on teachers' emotions in Hong Kong. A thematic analysis was performed on the transcripts of interviews conducted in 2012 with 21 teachers at Hong Kong secondary schools and on the policy documents and newspaper articles from the education reform era of 1980 to 2011. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the institutional logic of whole-person education, (2) the institutional logic of accountability, and (3) an asymmetry between these institutional logics, which is causing a displacement of the meaning of education and thus has emotional consequences for teachers. Taken together, these themes show that managerialist education reforms bring the institutional logic of accountability into the institutional environment of education, which results in the recoupling of school administration and teachers' work. This recoupling leads to the decline of teachers' work autonomy. The institutional logic of accountability tends to inhibit the institutional logic of whole-person education and to replace the instructional meaning of education with managerial meanings. In the institutional context, teachers are forced to do a lot of work that they interpret as meaningless, but they find that they are powerless to change the situation. They may therefore choose to inhabit the institutional logic of accountability and the tightly coupled institutional context of school organizations. Consequently, teachers may become unhappy at work during and after managerialist education reforms. According to these findings, teachers' emotions can be regarded as an interactional-institutional construction. That is, teachers' emotions may be socially constructed through the negotiation of meaning under the institutional logics that guide their actions and the interactions that uphold the institutional context of the school organizations that they inhabit.