Novice Principal Burnout: Exploring Secondary Trauma, Working Conditions, and Coping Strategies in an Urban District

ABSTRACT

Steady school leadership can support student achievement and equity-related outcomes, but the principalship is becoming more stressful with increasing demands, duties, and expectations. Burnout is one of several factors that contribute to principal turnover which often destabilizes a school community. Individual and organizational factors contribute to principal burnout, but remain relatively unexamined. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to analyze the factors that contribute to burnout among novice principals in one large urban school district in the Southwestern U.S. Findings highlight the impact of secondary trauma, working conditions, and coping strategies on principal burnout.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Maslach and Jackson (1981) has been cited as the most frequent survey used measure of professional burnout (Volpe et al., 2014; Worley et al., 2008). For the purposes of this study, only the emotional exhaustion subscale was used a separate dimension of burnout. The items that are scored on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from never (0) to (6) every day. The development of the MBI yielded good reliability for the emotional exhaustion subscale (α = .89).

2. The ProQOL assesses the constructs of compassion satisfaction and compassion fatigue across three unique subscales: burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion satisfaction. Cronbach’s alpha values on the three subscales ranged from .75 to .88, respectively in the most recent published version of the survey (Stamm, 2010).

3. Recent research using the AWS with secondary school teachers have scale reliability coefficients ranging from .66 to .80 (Masluk et al., 2018). Higher scores on AWS scales reflect positive work experiences.

4. Add information about VAM models.

5. Some principals were assigned to multiple campuses, which explains why the district had 220 schools but only 210 principals.

6. In all models, outcome variables and predictors of interest were converted to z-scores for ease of comparison.

7. We also created a graph plot to illustrate how the predictor variables related to burnout in comparison to each other. The predictors were converted into Z-scores to standardize the interpretation of them. Appendix A shows that secondary trauma is the strongest predictor to burnout, with control and reward having a smaller but still significant predictive impact on burnout. This graph provides a more illustrative view of the degree to which secondary trauma and the work life variables relate to burnout in secondary trauma.