The Chain Mediating Effect Analysis Of The Challenge Demands And Beginning Teachers’ Thriving In Primary And Secondary School

In July 2021,the implementation of the "double reduction" policy pushed the work pressure and challenges faced by primary and secondary school teachers to a new climax with a strong discourse of reform,resulting in their job burnout and a series of health problems.This phenomenon is particularly obvious for beginning teachers,and has become a research subject that cannot be ignored in the fields of psychology,education and other fields,and also become a realistic problem urgently to be solve in "double reduction" reform.Admittedly,such high pressure challenges can "dampen" beginning teachers’ work enthusiasm,weaken their teaching efficacy,and improve turnover intention.However,recent studies have found that challenge demands,serving as a positive pressure source,can stimulate individual intrinsic motivation,transform it into the "power" to motivate the individual to move forward,and enhance their work vitality.This has a certain enlightenment for the current beginning teachers of the Primary and Secondary school to actively deal with the challenge of "double reduction".Currently,scholars have not reached an agreement on the relationship between challenge demands and the outcome variables,and pay more attention to their negative impacts on individual physical and mental health,ignoring individual’s efforts to alleviate the mismatch between their own ability and job requirements by adopting various positive ways to promote self-empowerment and overcome challenges.As for the research on the mechanism of thriving,most existing studies focus on the net effect of single factors such as situation characteristics and job resources on thriving,but few studies include the linkage effect of multiple factors into it.This to a certain extent,led to the existing studies cannot profoundly explain the complex dynamic process of the mechanism of thriving acquisition.Based on this,this study combining relevant theories,constructs a chain mediating model that takes challenge demands as prerequisite variable and beginning teachers’ thriving as a variable,intrinsic motivation,exploration and psychological empowerment as the mediating variables.And it attempts to deeply explore the internal mechanism of transforming "pressure" of challenge demands into "motivation",so as to explore the internal mechanism of challenge demands and thriving,in order to provide new power beginning teachers of the primary and secondary school to cope with challenge demands.In Study 1,According to the results of qualitative interview and the quantitative analysis,the PSSCDQ including 19 items and four dimensions,such as professional ethics requirements,work overload,time pressure and responsibility;the PSSEQ consists of 9 items,including relationship extension,direction extension and behavior exploration;And both scales can be used as an effective measurement tool for this study with good reliability and validity.In Study 2,a total of 373 valid questionnaires were collected.Through research and analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:1.Challenge demands can directly promote beginning teachers’ thriving,and among the different dimensions of challenge demands,professional ethics requirements,time pressure can positively thriving,and work overload negatively predict thriving;2.Challenge demands can stimulate the intrinsic motivation,improve the level of exploration and enhance the psychological empowerment experience of beginning teachers in the primary and secondary school.The intrinsic motivation,exploration and psychological empowerment positively affect the thriving.Hence,intrinsic motivation,exploration and psychological empowerment all play a complete mediating role between challenge demands and thriving,and the three simple mediating effects have no significant difference;3.The "intrinsic motivation-psychological empowerment" chain and the "explorationpsychological empowerment" chain also played a complete mediating role between challenge demands and thriving.The indirect effect of "intrinsic motivation-exploration-psychological empowerment" chain between challenge demands and thriving was significant,but there was a "suppressing effect" between challenge demands and thriving;4.There are significant differences between male and female beginning teachers in challenge demands and exploration;the intrinsic motivation and exploration were significantly different in the beginning teachers education,the intrinsic motivation,psychological empowerment and thriving were significantly different in the beginning teachers teaching age.From the above studies results,the following constructive suggestions are proposed for beginning teachers to actively cope with work challenges and improve the level of thriving:(1)It is recommended that society and school highlight teachers’ professional ethics and improve teachers’ working status by taking "virtue" and "reputation" in to consideration at the same time;(2)It is also suggested that society and school pay attention to teachers’ work overload and scientifically arrange teachers challenge demands;(3)Beginning teachers are advised to stimulate sustainable power,improve creative tension,enhance growth vitality through their own efforts,and finally create synergy for meeting the challenges and promoting thriving at work.