1 Introduction
Macau is a city near Hong Kong and famous for its gaming business. After the government opened the gaming licensure in 2002, both the number of casinos and the revenue generated from the gaming business increase. People working in casinos can usually receive nearly double the pay of those with the same education background but working in other sectors. It attracts quite a number of young people to work there especially those with less motivation to study. The prevailing atmosphere of working in casinos is so great that it affects the traditional Chinese values of studying hard in order to earn more money for a better life. Community voices increasing concerns about schools enhancing teaching of ideals, will power and personal values so that young people can be positively developed and better prepared to resist the temptation of gambling in the city.
In Macau, there is a 15-year free non-tertiary education system with direct promotion from primary to secondary school without any public examination. There is no public examination either but individual admission examination after secondary school education for entry into local universities. The total number of schools is 82 with 5,100 teachers and the overall teacher–student ratio is 1:17.7 (Education and Youth Affairs Bureau
2008a). As a statutory requirement, teachers who are qualified to teach in kindergarten, primary and secondary school must be graduates from the school of education. Those who are not from the teaching background have to complete a teaching course and pass an examination organized by the government in order to obtain professional qualification in teaching (Education and Youth Affairs Bureau
2008b). As a Chinese community, people are expected to behave in line with their social roles. At schools, teachers are expected to be knowledgeable and with high moral standard. Students are to be well-disciplined, self-engaged and reflective in learning. Teachers are dominant and directive in the Eastern pedagogical culture (Zhang
2007). Therefore, teaching has long been a respectable profession in the Chinese culture. However, with the increasing demand from the public to meet the knowledge needed by the changing world and the greater effort for moral education at the same time, teaching is becoming more stressful and teachers are more prone to burnout.
In the prevention of burnout of teachers, a stress reduction program was designed for one primary and one secondary school in Macau as requested from the school principals. These two schools were established in 2002 by a charity organization to receive students, mainly new immigrants from Mainland China. They are non-religious, non-profit making private schools with full tuition sponsored by the government. Since no formal study on burnout was conducted on this group of teachers, it is important to get to know their burnout situation before the implementation of the stress reduction program. This study is to explore the burnout situation of the teachers of these two schools. Furthermore, this study also examines the effect of burnout related to demographic variables, their problem solving ability and general well being.
The term “burnout” was first coined by Freudenberger (
1974) to characterize a situation experienced by human service professionals who appear to be exhausted or up to a state of inability to perform their tasks effectively or sometimes even to care for their clients. Maslach (
1976) defined burnout as a condition in which one loses all concerns, feeling toward the person one works with and comes to treat them as impersonal objects. Maslach and Jackson (
1981) developed a multidimensional model to delineate three aspects of the content of burnout, namely: (1) emotional exhaustion (feeling of drain and tiredness), (2) depersonalization (treating clients as impersonal objects), and (3) lack of personal accomplishment (feeling of inefficiency, ineffectiveness and inadequacy). Since Maslach and Jackson’s model has been adopted widely in investigating teachers’ burnout syndromes and the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is also consistently found to be a reliable instrument, this model was adopted in the present study (Lau et al.
2005; Mo
1991; Sarros and Sarros
1990; Xu et al.
2004). Burnout has generally been viewed as a failure to cope with job stress and there is an international concern about stress and burnout among school teachers (Dworkin
1997; Maslach and Jackson
1981). Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate sources of stress of school teachers and its management. Broadly speaking, job nature in terms of overwork, classroom discipline, lack of parental support; personal factor consisting of blaming oneself, low self-efficacy, neuroticism; and environmental factors such as lack of information about changes, lack of social, organizational and government supports are the major sources of stress.
Besides large volume of studies about the etiology of stress, there were also many studies on demographic data relating to stress. The most common variables for study are sex, teaching classes, marital status, teaching experiences, education, professional and religious backgrounds. These variables together with satisfaction with income were also examined in this study. In the studies of burnout among human service professionals including teachers by Maslach et al. (
1996), results showed that female staff had higher emotional exhaustion than male colleagues. Mendes (
2003) examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and teacher burnout on 49 credentialed secondary teachers and found that with more experience, teachers were better at identifying emotions. Lau et al. (
2005) investigated the relationship between teachers’ demographic variables and burnout in Hong Kong using the C-MBI on 1797 respondents from 45 secondary schools. Gender differences were found in all three burnout syndromes, and teachers who were younger, unmarried, without religious beliefs, less experienced, without finishing professional training and of junior rank were more consistently burned-out. Whereas age was the strongest predictor for emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, teachers’ rank is the best predictor for personal accomplishment. In addition, Li et al. (
2007) explored the relationship between teachers’ sense of teaching efficacy and job burnout by using the Teachers’ Sense of Teaching Efficacy Scale and the C-MBI which were administered to 247 secondary school teachers. Results indicated that teachers’ length of teaching and marital status have significant effects on their personal teaching efficacy, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment.
However, there were also some inconsistent findings relating to relationship among the demographic variables and burnout. For instance, Holloman (
1999) examined what personal and school-related variables were associated with 383 first-year school teacher burnout. No statically significant differences were found between areas of burnout and the variables of: gender, age and marital status. Likewise, the study by Zhao and Bi (
2003) in a sample of 190 secondary school teachers in Chinese Mainland showed that there was no difference between the genders in the three burnout syndromes. A meta-analysis conducted by Weng (
2005) in 35 US research studies with K-12 teacher populations concluded that all of the variables of human characteristics included in the demographics of the selected studies did not have very strong predictive correlations with burnout. That means a single factor, such as gender, cannot be used to predict if a person would be more than others susceptible to three dimensions of burnout.
Other studies also showed that burnout was associated with adverse health outcomes (Lee and Ashforth
1996; Maslach and Goldberg
1998). A recent study by Bian and Fan (
2006) investigating the status of teacher’s stress of 1012 middle school teachers and the relationship between stress and mental health in Chinese Mainland showed that the stress and the total score of Symptom Check List 90 (SCL-90) had positive correlation. It is suggested to improve the teacher’s mental health by reducing their stress. Wang and Guo (
2007) studied the relationship among occupational stress, teacher burnout and mental health state of 564 primary and middle school teachers in Chinese Mainland. Questionnaires about occupation stress, teacher burnout and SCL-90 Scale were used. Results showed that there were significant correlation among occupational stress, teacher burnout and mental health. There is a high level of occupational stress, teacher burnout and low level of mental health. In managing the burnout situation, social problem solving ability has been viewed as one of the coping strategies to stress in promoting personal well being. Many studies supported that higher social problem solving ability related to higher psychological well-being and general health (Dreer et al.
2005; Paul-Odouard
2006; Siu and Shek
2005a). Problem solving training in the workplace has been conducted to help employees to reduce distress (Ayres and Malouff
2007; Malouff et al.
2007). However, when Huey (
2007) examined whether social problem solving ability moderates the effects of occupational stress on burnout, results indicated that though social problem solving ability significantly correlated with all three dimensions of burnout, more effective problem solving may not buffer against burnout under higher levels of occupational stress. Since no previous study regarding these areas is conducted in Macau, one of the aims of this study is to examine the relation of burnout situation to social problem solving and total well being.
With reference to Macau, though there were some studies on teacher stress, most studies adopted a survey approach with self-developed questionnaire which is difficult to be used for international comparison. Furthermore, little is known about the consequences of increasing stress. Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (
2001) conducted a telephone survey on 450 school teachers of all primary and secondary education sectors out of 3194. Results showed that 43.0% of respondents felt stressful at work and 47.5% expressed frequent fatigue at school work. Coping strategies recommended included reducing teaching sessions, providing more free time for school teachers and gaining cooperation from parents. Another postal survey conducted by a teacher professional association on 717 school teachers indicated that 61.4% of respondents perceived their work as “exhausted work”. The ranking of difficulties at work listed were lack of learning motivation of students, heavy workload and too many students per class (Macau Chinese Education Association
2002). Ng (
2002) carried out a comparison study about teacher’s time spent on 400 school teachers each on Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong and Macau. Results showed that both teachers in Hong Kong and Macau were overloaded, working hours were double than those of the teachers of other three cities and time spent mostly were in class teaching, preparation for teaching and marking assignments. A study by Liu (
2005) showed that when compared with Shanghai, Macau lacked approximately one-third of school teachers suggesting school teachers in Macau bear the workload of three teachers as compared with the workload of school teachers in Shanghai.
Since there is a paucity of empirical studies of teacher stress locally, and the relation of burnout with problem solving ability and personal well being is never studied in Macau, the present study can contribute to the understanding in these areas which can help design the stress reduction program as a means of coping strategy. Specifically, this study aims to explore the burnout situation of teachers in two schools in Macau and to investigate any differences made of demographic characteristics. The relation of burnout on social problem solving and the total well being of teachers is also examined. In this study, three questions are raised in the attempt to find out the burnout situation among the teachers in these two schools: (1) What is the level of different burnout syndromes of teachers in these two schools? (2) Do demographic characteristics make a difference in burnout situation? (3) Will the burnout situation relate to their social problem solving and total well being?