The relationships among professional stress, organizational climate, selective demographic variables and teachers' burnout, 1985

The problem of this study was to determine if any significant relationships existed among organizational climate, professional stress, selective demographic variables and teachers' burnout. The sample for this study consisted of 113 teachers in 10 secondary schools in the DeKalb County School System. Teachers within each school were randomly selected to report their perceptions of the school's climate on Halpin's Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire, of professional stress on Anderson and Sweeten's Organizational Leadership Stress Questionnaire, of teachers' burnout on Jackson and Maslach's Maslach Burnout Inventory. In addition, teachers were requested to complete a 3 item questionnaire to provide demographic data for the study. Correlation analysis and factor analysis were employed to analyze the data. Null hypotheses were rejected at the p < .01 level of confidence. On the basis of the statistical treatment of the data utilized in this study, the following conclusions were drawn: Professional stress is significantly related to the frequency and intensity of the burnout dimensions, Depersonalization and Emotional Exhaustion; however, professional stress is not significantly related to the burnout dimension, Personal Accomplishment. The demographic variables, teaching experience, age and educational level are not significantly related to the frequency and intensity of the three dimensions, and professional stress, the eight dimensions of the Organizational Climate Description Questionnaire (OCDQ), age, years of teaching experience and educational level are not significantly related to each other. Based on the aforementioned findings/conclusions the following recommendations were suggested for future research: 1. Additional studies utilizing larger samples in more diverse areas are conducted to replicate this research. Teachers and principals from all grade levels should be used to expand the scope of this study. 2. Attempts should be made to try to identify other variables that may be significantly related to teachers ' burnout because other variables may be found to be stronger predictors of teachers' burnout. 3. Educational administrators should keep abreast of the literature on stress/burnout in order to pro-vide corrective/preventive measures when warranted