Abstract:

Educational practice brings signals about a relatively high load of teaching profession connected to the occurrence of health, psychical, physical, and emotional burnout. Developing instruments for psychological assessment at work has evolved from traditional to new constructs related to optimal performance and health in work settings. These new constructs are situated under the paradigm of positive occupational health psychology (POHP; Bakker & Derks, 2010). POHP aims to promote employee health through the identification of actors and variables that contribute to optimal performance. Shirom (2003) proposes the multidimensional construct of “vigour”. He defines it as an affect that represents a pattern of responses to contextual cues, that is, “an emotional response interaction with significant elements of the work and its context comprising interrelated feelings of physical strength, emotional energy, and cognitive liveliness” (Shirom, 2003, p. 12). Type D personality is characterised by high social inhibition and also high negative affectivity. Current research studies on the D type have shown that this type of personality has negative effects on physical and mental state, as well as on work-related problems which in the life of employees, especially in helping professions, are often manifested by a sense of job burnout. The aim of the research was to find relationships between vigour, burnout, and type D personality in teachers. We also focused on the relationships between subscales variables, namely type D personality (negative affectivity, social inhibition), vigour (physical strength, cognitive liveliness, emotional energy), and burnout (physical fatigue, cognitive weariness, emotional exhaustion). In the study, we used the following methodologies: Shirom-Melamed vigour measure (Shirom, Melamed, 2003): in our sample, Cronbach’s α for overall vitality = 0.95; Shirom-Melamed burnout measure (Shirom, Melamed, 2006): in our sample, Cronbach’s α for overall burnout = 0.93; and the type D personality questionnaire DS14 (Denollet, 1998): according to Ďurko (2014) Cronbach’s α for negative affectivity reached the value of 0.88 and for social inhibition the value of 0.86. The research sample consisted of 57 teachers, including 50 women and seven men, aged from 22 to 60 years (M = 39 years of age). We found out significant negative relationships between subscales variables of type D personality (negative affectivity, social inhibition) and vigour (physical strength, cognitive liveliness, emotional energy) in the teachers. We also found out significant positive relationships between subscales of type D personality (negative affectivity and social inhibition) and subscales of burnout, namely physical fatigue, cognitive weariness, and emotional exhaustion in the teachers. The results show that in the group of teachers, there was a significant relationship between the subscales of type D personality and mental health – positive in terms of burnout and negative in terms of vitality. We found out that 16 teachers from the sample were type D personalities, representing up to 28 % of the whole sample. We consider the findings alarming and in Discussion we emphasise that it is not only necessary, but even inevitable to do something in favour of improving mental and overall health of teachers.

Keywords:

Vigour, burnout, type D personality, teachers.