Personal resources and personal vulnerability factors at work: An application of the Job Demands-Resources model among teachers at private schools in Peru

Abstract

We examine the role of personal resources (hardiness) and personal vulnerability factors (external locus of control and helplessness) at work, among 430 teachers at private schools. Based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and the conservation of resources theory, we parallel tested both motivational and health-impairment processes on the teachers' individual outcomes. The JDR model's motivational process was related to life satisfaction, and the health impairment process to perception of ill health. We hypothesize that hardiness will foster work engagement and that its role in the motivational process will be to mediate between job resources and work engagement. Then, we hypothesize that hardiness will prevent job burnout. Self-evaluations are expected to be activated by job burnout as an effect of its third dimension, inefficacy. We examine the mediational role of these self-evaluations between job burnout and ill health, and between job burnout and life satisfaction. The hypotheses are tested simultaneously using structured equation modelling. The results indicate that hardiness partially mediates the relationship between job resources and work engagement, and that hardiness reduces job burnout. Self-evaluations did not increase perception of ill health, but they did mediate the relationship between job burnout and life satisfaction. The findings show that hardiness plays the role of a personal resource in the motivational process and that it also has a preventive function against job burnout. Personal vulnerability factors, in the form of self-evaluations, were activated by job burnout, and their role was to significantly reduce life satisfaction. We discuss the implications of these findings.