The Influence Of Implicit Followership Theories On Individual Career Management Among Preschool Teachers

With the development of the times,preschool teachers have more decision-making power over their own career development,which means that they need to take more responsibility for individual career management.Previous research has shown that individual career management is closely related to employees’ job performance,satisfaction,and other factors,but most of these studies focus on the role of individual career management as an independent variable,and there is relatively little research on its internal motivation factors.Therefore,it is necessary and valuable to explore the internal motivation of individual career management.Implicit followership refers to the pre-existing expectations or schemas of the follower role in an individual’s mind,and is one of the internal motivations for individual development.Psychological empowerment is the cognitive experience of authorization,which can promote individuals to engage in positive role shaping.Therefore,this study focused on preschool teachers,and explored the influence of implicit followership on individual career management and the mediating role of psychological empowerment in it.Given the special cultural and research object characteristics,this study first followed a rigorous scale development process,including interview investigation,item sorting,exploratory analysis,confirmatory analysis,and reliability and validity testing,to develop a “Preschool Teachers’ Implicit Followership Scale” with characteristics of the Chinese preschool teacher population.Then,combined with the“Psychological Empowerment Scale” and “Individual Career Management Scale,” a questionnaire was administered to 550 preschool teachers from different provinces.The following conclusions were obtained:(1)The Implicit Followership Scale for Preschool teachers has 13 items,including three dimensions of work attitude,workability,and interpersonal relationship,with good reliability and validity;(2)There are significant differences in implicit followership among preschool teachers of different ages and teaching experience.The implicit followership level of preschool teachers aged 18-25 is lower than those over 25,and the implicit followership level of teachers with less than 2 years of teaching experience is lower than those with 3-5 years of experience.There are also significant differences in psychological empowerment among preschool teachers with different educational levels,with the psychological empowerment level of teachers with junior college degrees or below being higher than those with bachelor’s degrees or above.(3)Implicit followership,psychological empowerment,and individual career management are significantly positively correlated with each other.Implicit followership has a positive impact on individual career management,and psychological empowerment plays a mediating role between implicit followership and individual career management.Based on these findings,this study proposes suggestions for enhancing the individual career management ability of preschool teachers by improving the enthusiasm for implicit followership and enhancing psychological empowerment at both the kindergarten and preschool teacher levels,thus contributing to the construction of an excellent preschool teacher team.