A Research On Teachers' Work Values And Its Effects

As the dynamic factor of the direction of thinking and behavior, work values embody teachers' professional development and cultivation of professional psychological qualities. It has become an important direction of education studies that we explore the professional behavior and its performance through the perspective of work values. Researchers have made wide-ranging researches on the work values' structure, developmental characteristics and influencing factors of the employees and undergraduates. However, in the literatures, we find that the researches are single research orientation, and focus on the related factors and questionnaire, lacking of researches on in-service teachers' work values and integration and localization research orientations; they focus on the related factors of work values, lacking of researchers on the relationship between work values and professional behavior; and research methods are main questionnaire survey, lacking of research methods of cross-validation, multivariate analysis and advanced statistics.Proceeding form the integrated research orientation, this paper, using sentence completion test and questionnaire survey, qualitative research and quantitative research methods, exploring and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation technology, makes a systematic research on the teachers' work values from theoretical and empirical perspectives. This paper included three aspects: the structure of the teachers' work values and measuring tools establishment, analysis on the teachers' work values characteristics, and exploring on the effects of teachers' values.Summing up all the researches mentioned above, the results are as follows:1.Teachers' work values is a multi-dimensioned systematic structure, composed of 1 second level factor and 7 first level factors, which include material reward, prestigious status, professional development, interpersonal relationship, organizational management, altruism & dedication and security & stability.2.The self edited Teachers' Work Values Scale possess good index of psychometrics and are befitting to the measurement instrument to measure primary and secondary school teachers' work values.3.Teachers' overview on the work values is positive and enthusiastic; all the mean of dimensions of teachers' work values is more than 4 except the security & stability dimension; the order of rating of all dimensions given by teachers is: altruism & dedication, organizational management, material reward, prestigious status, interpersonal relationship, professional development, and the security & stability.4.Teachers' work values are influenced by individual's background variables. Female teachers rate work values more important than male teachers; teachers' work values from key schools (except for material reward dimension) are significantly higher than that of non-key schools; Primary teachers' work values are significantly higher than that of secondary school teachers; city school teachers concern on professional development and security & stability dimensions significantly higher than that of township teachers, rural teachers pay more attention to altruism & dedication and interpersonal relationship dimensions; The order of the teachers' work values on the teaching subjects is Yushuwai, Zhengshidilihuasheng, and Yintimei. Teachers of Yushuwai subjects pay more attentions on the material rewards, organizational management and security & stability dimensions than that of Yintimei, pay more attentions on prestige status, interpersonal relationship, altruism & dedication significantly high than that of Zhengshidilihuasheng's teachers; there is complex relation which teachers' title level and qualifications influencing work values; in teaching age, "new" and "old" teachers rate work values more important..5.There are positive relations between Teachers' work values and job performance; altruism & devotion, security & stability and prestigious status are the predictors of task performance, job dedication and overall performance; altruism & dedication, security & stability, and interpersonal relationship dimensions are the predictors of interpersonal promotion; teachers' background variables, such as the location and type of school, and teach subjects act as regulatory role on the work values predicting job performance.6.The material reward dimension of teachers work values is negatively related with job satisfaction; other dimensions are significantly positively correlated with job satisfaction, but the correlation coefficient is lower; teachers' work values can effectively predict job satisfaction, but the predict effect is less; teachers' background variables, such as the school, the location and type of school, and qualification act as regulatory role on the work values predicting job satisfaction.7.Teacher' job performance is the intervening variable of work values influencing overall satisfaction partly, But job satisfaction can not intervene the equation model which work values influencing overall performance; the effect model of teachers' work values is: work values-job performance-job satisfaction.To sum up, this paper makes some creations on the following aspects:1) In research content, based on theoretical analysis, it discusses the meaning of teachers work values from empirical perspective, constructs the dimension structure of teachers' work values with Chinese characteristics, makes measurement instrument of teachers work values scale, analyzes the effect of individual's variables influencing work values detailed and verifies current developmental features of primary and secondary school teachers' work values;2) In research orientation, based on "draws conclusions from incomplete information" phenomenon because of different research orientations of the work values, it defines the concept of teachers' work values by integrated orientation, and has constructed the integrated model of work values roughly on the work values effecting job performance and satisfaction under teachers' personal backgrounds preliminarily, reflects the integration of research orientation fully;3) In research methods, traditional questionnaire survey has its advantages, but it is difficult to avoid the social systematic error, this paper, combined questionnaire survey and the projection method, which adopts the sentence completion test and questionnaire cross-certification, not only makes up for the deficiencies of questionnaire, but also promotes the diversity and comprehensiveness of research methods on work values;4) In research idea, based on the educational psychology view and taking teachers occupational development as the goal, it analyzes the relationship between teachers' work values and their professional behaviors systematically, including the effect power of work values influencing job performance and satisfaction, and especially revealing the causal relationship among teachers' work values, job performance and job satisfaction.