Teachers’ adjustment to work: Effects of organizational justice and teacher resilience via psychological need satisfaction

Abstract

There is a gap in the literature for how organizational and individual factors affect teachers’ adjustment. This study, focused on teachers, attempts to fill this lack by examining the extents to which psychological need satisfaction acts as a mediator between organizational justice, resilience, and teachers’ adjustment to work. We based this study on the predictive model of psychological health at work, psychological adjustment theory, and self-determination theory which argue that individuals have a sense of well-being at work if it promotes the satisfaction of their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We tested our model in the education sector. Using a cross-sectional design, we asked French teachers (N = 393) to fill in a one-step self-report questionnaire. Mediation analyses showed that satisfaction of the three needs played a mediating role between organizational justice and job adjustment, and between resilience and job adjustment.

Keywords:

• Adaptation
• maladaptation
• need satisfaction
• organizational justice
• resilience

Tribute

This article pays tribute to Samuel Paty, a history-geography teacher who was murdered by a terrorist in France in 2020 following a class on free speech.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Canadian professors of the university of Montreal, J-S Boudrias, A Savoie, L Brunet for the scales of this survey and for the initial Franco-Quebec research.