The Effect of Job Standardization on Job Burnout: The Role of Psychological Capital and Workload of Private Middle School Teachers in Honduras

Abstract

noneBurnout syndrome is affecting working professionals and other people around the world. Now, studies have found the effect of burnout and how this affects the physical and psychological aspect of people´s lives. Teachers do deserve special attention and consideration even if they are no more stressed and burned out than other professionals. As a society, we rely on teachers to mold our children since they are the future citizens of our nation. Job standardization has proven to make people work more efficiently while using less resources and producing less waste. However, teachers have to deal with different students every day; each student has a different personality, potential and the way they each learn is not the same. The workload teachers have to handle has also increased through the years, this is because they are to reach certain goals and standards that have been set by others. This study tries to investigate why standardizing every aspect of a teacher’s job may prevent the teacher of reaching his or her full potential. By setting new standards teachers are burdened with a higher workload every year, making them work longer periods of time, with the same salary and with high expectations set on the results the children produce. A teacher suffering from burnout is not nearly as productive as one not suffering from it. This study also tries to explain how having a positive psychological capital will probably delay the burnout syndrome if the teacher is suffering from it. This would also enable them to handle negative events in a more satisfactory manner. The sample of this study are 150 middle school teachers working in the private sector in Honduras. An online questionnaire has been developed in order to collect the data of this study. All the questions of the questionnaire were well-established items derived from previous studies. Simple linear and hierarchical regression analysis were employed to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings of this study provide meaningful implications for private education institutions in Honduras. For this study the researcher hopes that it can be used as a guide for human resource professionals as well as professionals in other areas on how teachers feel and how they could manage burnout syndrome, job standardization, psychological capital, and workload in a more effective way in order to obtain better results.