The Significance of School Relationships, Relational Teacher Self-Efficacy and Teacher Collective Efficacy to Teachers' Job Satisfaction

Abstract

This study investigates how teacher-to-student and teacher-to-teacher relationships affect teachers’ job satisfaction, and how these relationships might be mediated by teacher self-efficacy and teacher collective efficacy in schools. A structural equation model (SEM) was used to investigate the above relationships using data from the 2013 administration of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), particularly data collected from 1773 lower secondary school teachers from Alberta, Canada. The results indicated that teacher-to-student relationships were directly related to teacher job satisfaction and indirectly related to teacher job satisfaction through the mediator variable of teacher collective efficacy. Also, teacher-to-teacher relationships were related to teacher job satisfaction but only through the mediator variable of teacher collective efficacy. The findings are discussed in terms of their practical implications for teachers.