The relationship of high school teachers' job satisfaction to principal support

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between high school teacher job satisfaction, using an instrument that measures Herzberg's Two Factor Theory and principal support, using an adapted instrument from House's theory of administrative support. Data were collected by a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bressler, Kathleen M.
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: W&M ScholarWorks 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539618847
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2057&context=etd
Description
Summary:The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between high school teacher job satisfaction, using an instrument that measures Herzberg's Two Factor Theory and principal support, using an adapted instrument from House's theory of administrative support. Data were collected by a team of researchers from 34 self-selected public Virginia high schools and consisted of 1276 teacher participants. Correlation and regression analyses were performed to find the relationship between teacher job satisfaction and principal support. The results showed no significant relationship between principal support and high school teacher job satisfaction. This may be explained in part by the weakness of the Professional Job Satisfaction Survey (PJSS). The data on the Principal Support Scale (PSS) revealed two distinct factors of principal support that related back to House's original theory of administrative support (DiPaola, in press). A significant positive correlation was found between the expressive and instrumental dimensions of principal support (r = .796, p < .01). A significant negative correlation was found between job satisfiers and job dissatisfiers (r = -.421, p < .05). Based on these findings future researchers should continue to explore this topic with a more reliable measurement of job satisfaction. Future researchers should continue to explore the relevance of Herzberg's two factor theory in education and examine the effect of external forces on both job satisfaction and principal support. Continued use of the PSS for measuring principal support in relationships with other school social variables is also strongly supported by this study.