Research on the Correlation Mechanism of Psychological Safety, Relational Identification and Young Teachers Engagement in University ()
1. Introduction
According to the 2021 statistics of Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, there were 1.83 million full-time teachers in Chinese regular high education institutions, of which 49% were under the age of 40 (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2021). With the youth trend of teachers in university, young teachers have become the main force of the university teachers (Liu, Ye, & Guo, 2018), thus their work attitudes have an important role in personnel training, scientific research, service for society and the inheritance and innovation of culture. At the same time, they are under high levels of occupational pressure due to the heavy financial pressures from families and the challenges of teaching and scientific research (Meng & Wang, 2018). Therefore, considering the importance and particularity of young teachers, how to create incentives to enhance their work enthusiasm and improve their working performance has become the focus of the human resources management department in universities.
In the past decades, the issue of employee engagement in various social organizations has attracted plenty of attention from scholars. Compare with factors such as employee satisfaction, organizational trust, and employee loyalty, etc., the impact of engagement on performance is more significant (Kaur, 2017). As a positive psychological state, employee engagement is defined as the extent to which members of an organization engage in organizational role and complete their works, physically, cognitively, and emotionally as well as express themselves in it (Kahn, 1990). Whether engagement improves depends on how well members of the organization translate their work attitudes into work behaviors. From this perspective, the studies on engagement can be conducted from both emotional engagement and behavioral engagement (Xu & Cooper Thomas, 2011). Influencing the engagement attitude of young teachers and guiding their behavior through proper incentives is the key to the construction of talent system and human resource management in universities.
The non-profit nature and knowledge-intensive characteristics of universities determine that young teachers care more about spiritual motivation (Falola, Olokundun, Salau, Oludayo, & Ibidunni, 2018). While under the unfavorable factors in post level, qualifications, discourse power, and performance pressure, etc., young teachers are more sensitive to environmental pressures, so the paths that affect their work engagement are more specific (Gu & Levin, 2021). On the one hand, young teachers have to take the risks and pressures due to the need of constant innovation in their work, so the positive work environment with atmosphere of psychological safety is essential (Ali Taha, Sirkova, & Ferencova, 2016). On the other hand, the rapid growth of young teachers relies on knowledge sharing and teamwork heavily, and good interpersonal relationships are likely to lead to trust and rapid information sharing (Douglas, Bore, & Munro, 2016; Walumbwa & Hartnell, 2011). Therefore, this paper aims to study work engagement of young teachers from the perspective of interpersonal context in organizations, attempts to explore the correlation mechanism between psychological safety, relational identification and engagement among young teachers by means of empirical research methods, so as to obtain the path of improving the engagement of young teachers and provide a theoretical basis for the design of relevant incentives in universities.
2. Literature Review and Research Hypotheses
To explore the correlation between the engagement attitude and the engagement behavior of young teachers in the interpersonal context, literature review and research framework construction will be conducted from two aspects. First, explore the potential correlation between psychological safety, relational identification, and engagement among young teachers. Second, deconstruct young teachers’ engagement properly and then explore the correlation further.
Psychological Safety and Engagement
Research on psychological safety developed from the focus on the psychological and emotional problems of employees in the field of organizational change (Schein & Bennis, 1965). At the individual level, psychological safety refers to employees believing that they can present and practice their ideas safely in their work environment without fear of negative impacts on their personal image, organizational status, or career prospects (Zhang, Fang, Wei, & Chen, 2010). Therefore, the level of psychological safety of employees reflects the degree of tolerance that the organizations have toward their employees in the process of innovation and change. Employees with a high sense of psychological safety believe that they can fully express their views, act according to their own will, even if they made some mistakes, they can be forgiven by coworkers and the organization (Newman, Donohue, & Eva, 2017). When such a safe atmosphere is formed in the organization, employees can achieve the state of mutual respect, mutual support, mutual tolerance and risk shared (Chen & Tjosvold, 2010).
Relevant research shows that there is a significant correlation between working attitude, innovation ability and organizational atmosphere (Xi, Xu, Wang, & Zhao, 2017). Many researches have shown that psychological safety has a significant impact on the job performance, especially for the persons engaged in knowledge-based or innovative tasks. Chandrasekaran and Mishra believe that employees’ psychological safety is one of the main characteristics of high innovation performance teams (Chandrasekaran & Mishra, 2012). Carmeli et al. noted that the positive role of psychological safety between inclusive leadership styles and employee involvement in creative work (Carmeli, Reiter-Palmon, & Ziv, 2010). Parker and Plooy found that psychological safety is positively related to performance and team learning (Parker & Plooy, 2021). Based on the above ideas and research, this study hypothesizes that:
H1. Psychological safety will be positively related to engagement of young university teachers.
H1.1. Psychological safety will be positively related to emotional engagement of young university teachers.
H1.2. Psychological safety will be positively related to behavioral engagement of young university teachers.
Relational Identification and Engagement
Harmonious interpersonal relationship is of great significance to enhancing employees’ sense of organizational identity and belonging, and enhancing satisfaction and enthusiasm of employees (Jain & Ansari, 2018). On average, The turnover rate of teachers is lower compared to others, so the mutual support between colleagues and good interpersonal environment have a significant impact on their involvement and performance in a such stable working environment (Duffy & Lent, 2009). As an important indicator of interpersonal relationships in an organization, relational identification is defined as the extent to which individuals define themselves in terms of a given role-relationship (Sluss & Ashforth, 2007). Employees with high relationship recognition are more likely to put more effort into their work and have higher loyalty (Horstmeier, Boer, Homan, & Voelpel, 2017). For teachers, the most important interpersonal relationships are coworker relationships and teacher-student relationships.
Coworker relationships for teachers refer to relationships of trust, official, and cooperative in their daily lives, teaching and research (Xie & Li, 2021). For teachers in HELs, the requirement of intensive knowledge at work and the limitations of individual knowledge acquisition ability highlights the importance of knowledge sharing and knowledge sharing among them, and good coworker relationships are the key to effective cooperation among them. The teacher-student relationship is another important type of interpersonal relationship for teachers. Due to the similar age of students, young teachers have relatively more opportunities to get along with students. Therefore, the value of young teachers’ work is not only reflected in meeting students’ knowledge needs, but also in helping students’ ideological progress and career development with a higher sense of mission (Dall’Alba, 2005).
The degree of identification of young teachers with their coworker relationships and teachers-students relationship determines their evaluation of the interpersonal environment. Previous studies have shown that good evaluation of relationship not only has a positive effect on the job performance, but also reduces the negative situations such as workplace exclusion, marginalization, lack of safety, and tendency to quit (Thompson & Audrey Korsgaard, 2019). Therefore, relationship identification has an important impact on the work experience of young teachers, which in turn may lead to the change of their engagement attitudes and behaviors. Based on the above research and reasoning, it is hypothesized that:
H2. Relational identification will be positively related to engagement of young university teachers.
H2.1. Coworker relational identification will be positively related to emotional engagement of young university teachers.
H2.2. Coworker relational identification will be positively related to behavioral engagement of young university teachers.
H2.3. Teacher-student relational identification will be positively related to emotional engagement of young university teachers.
H2.4. Teacher-student relational identification will be positively related to behavioral engagement of young university teachers.
Emotional engagement and Behavioral engagement
Scholars generally agree that engagement measures how engaged employees in their work emotionally and behaviorally. However, whether emotional stimulation leads to changes of behavior in work, and whether there are differences in the stimulation mechanism of emotions among employees in different fields, needs to be further explored (Gruman & Saks, 2011).
Compared with employees in other industries, the group of young teachers has distinct professional characteristics. For example, they have higher educational qualifications, active thinking, and rich creativity (Liu, Keeley, & Buskist, 2014), they are responsible for the dual tasks of teaching and scientific research and bear great occupational pressure (Han, Yin, Wang, & Zhang, 2020), their innovation performance is clearly influenced by coworkers with high qualification in the team and their mental health issues are also more common (Pace, D’Urso, Zappulla, & Pace, 2019; Zhong et al., 2009), besides, they pay more attention to spiritual motivation, such as subjective work experience, self-expectations, and the domination of personal time, at the same time, they need material support and recognition of their abilities (Heng, Yang, Zou, Li, & Castaño, 2020; Wahyudi, 2022), etc. The work of young teachers is both mission-oriented and innovative, it needs the support of a higher level of spiritual motivation. Therefore, the formation of young teachers’ emotional engagement means the sublimation of subjective work attitudes, which may have a reinforcing effect on their behavioral engagement. Based on the above research and reasoning, it is hypothesized that:
H3. Emotional engagement of young teachers will be positively related to behavioral engagement of young university teachers.
Based on the above analysis, the research concept model constructed in this paper is shown in Figure 1.
3. Method
Measurement and Data Collection
At present, there are few quantitative studies on the work attitude and work behavior of young university teachers, in order to ensure the effectiveness of the scale design, this paper focused on the research literature of work engagement of
university teachers, knowledge-based persons, employees of non-profit organizations and people in other related fields. We then selected the validated maturity scales as reference to optimize and adjust the items in combination with the working environment and psychological characteristics of young teachers. The seven-point Likert scale was selected to measure all the items.
For psychological safety, considering that young teachers mainly act as participants rather than constructors in universities, the psychological safety scale from individual-level designed by Bendoly was used to measure the psychological safety of young teachers in this paper (Bendoly, 2014). Some items were modified to accommodate the language and context of the study due to the different research objectives. The final items used include: “If I made a mistake at work, I will not be punished by our team”, “I never worry about that asking questions in our team will affect my career prospects negatively”, “In our team, it is safe to try to take risks”.
For the relational identification, this paper designs the scale of coworker relational identification and teacher-student relational identification respectively. In terms of coworker relational identification. The measurement scale used in this paper was adapted from Li Min’s scale of the coworker relationship (Xie & Li, 2021), including: “My relationship with my coworkers is very good”, “teachers in our school are very easy-going”, “I think the interpersonal relationship within our school is very easy to handle”. In terms of teacher-student relational identification, we mainly refer to Aldrup’s (Aldrup, Klusmann, Lüdtke, Göllner, & Trautwein, 2018) method of defining and measuring the teacher-student relationship, and the items used include: “I have a very good relationship with the students”, “I am a teacher and also a friend to my students”, “I like my students, they also like me”.
For the measurement of engagement, the similarity of the subjects of the study and whether the measures of engagement behavior are satisfied with the measures of engagement deconstructed in this study were taken into account. The measurement scales of emotional engagement and behavioral engagement were designed based on Handa and Gulati’s scale (Handa & Gulati, 2014) on employees’ attitude and behavior. Then we optimized the items of emotional engagement coupling with the research of Perera et al. (Perera, Vosicka, Granziera, & McIlveen, 2018). The items used include: “I feel energetic at work”, “I am proud of my work”, “Time always passes quickly when I work”, “I think my work is interesting”. Behavioral engagement scale was obtained after further minor modifications based on the engagement scale proposed by Schaufeli (Schaufeli, Bakker, & Salanova, 2016), including: “I can work for a long time in a day”, “I want to contribute to the success of the school as much as I can”, “I am happy to look for ways to improve my performance”.
In the process of data collection, construction of the scale pool, the preliminary screening of the scale, the design of the questionnaire, and the optimization of the validity of the questionnaire were completed in turn. The final survey questionnaire was distributed through both online and offline, which lasted for one year. A total of 268 electronic and paper questionnaires were distributed. Considering completeness and formal rationality of questionnaire and whether the respondent has stable work team or environment, 223 valid questionnaires were finally used as the data source for quantitative analysis. In terms of the gender distribution of respondents, male teachers and female teachers accounted for 52% and 48% respectively; In terms of the distribution of respondents’ academic qualifications, the proportion of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees is 6%, 38% and 56% respectively; In terms of the distribution of respondents’ job titles, the proportions of lecturer, associate professor, professor are 63%, 26% and 8%, respectively; In terms of the distribution of the levels of the universities where the respondents worked, the proportion of “double-first-class” universities (including first-class universities or first-class disciplines), regular universities was 38%, 62% respectively; In terms of the geographical distribution of the universities where the respondents worked, including: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Anhui, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, Hubei, Xinjiang and other areas.
Reliability and Validity Test
To confirm the validity of the measurement of the scale, the validity and reliability were tested separately in this paper. Firstly, the exploratory factor analysis indicated a KMO sampling adequacy of 0.828, satisfying the critical value of 0.6 and p < 0.0001 for Bartlett’s sphericity test, showing that the data was suitable for the factor analysis. Five principal components were extracted from principal component analysis, and the cumulative variance contribution rate reached 85.74%. At the same time, items with factor loading less than 0.5 were removed from the scale. Then the factor loadings of each factor were higher than 0.7, meaning high concentration. Reliability for each of the factors was obtained using the calculation of a Cronbach’ α coefficient. The composite reliability value for all variables in the research model is greater than 0.85. Therefore, the scales used are reliable indicators of their corresponding constructs. As shown in Table 1.
Model Fit Analysis
AMOS 21.0 was employed test the research hypotheses through structural equation modeling. The model fit metrics are as follows: CMIN/DF = 3.549, RMR = 0.099, CFI = 0.940, NFI = 0.919, IFI = 0.941, TLI = 0.940, and RMSEA = 0.107. According to the empirical criteria of the fit index, the model fit index in this paper is at a good level. It can be seen that the match between the survey data and the conceptual model is good, and the results are suitable for characterizing the relationship between the latent variables involved in the model.
4. Results
Hypothesis Testing
Seven hypothesized relationships were tested by using AMOS 21.0, and the results are shown in Table 2. There are significant positive correlations between
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Table 1. The results of validity and reliability test.
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Table 2. Hypothesis testing results.
Note: *(p < 0.05), **(p < 0.01), ***(p < 0.001).
psychological safety and emotional engagement (H1.1), coworker relational identification and emotional engagement (H2.1), coworker relational identification and behavioral engagement (H2.2), teacher-student relational identification and emotional engagement (H2.3), teacher-student relational identification and behavioral engagement (H2.4). However, the correlations between psychological safety and behavioral engagement (H1.2), emotional engagement and behavioral engagement (H3) has not been supported by data and has not passed verification.
Model Modification
According to the results, there was no significant correlations between psychological safety and behavioral engagement, emotional engagement and behavioral engagement. In order to enhance the fit of the model, the path from psychological safety to behavioral engagement with the highest P value was excluded from the model. The adjusted model is shown in Figure 2.
After calculation through adjusted model, the correlation mechanism between the latent variables is consistent with the previous, but the correlation effect changes. Specifically, the standardized coefficient between psychological safety and emotional engagement has decreased, while the standardized coefficients between teacher-student relational identification and emotional engagement, teacher-student relational identification and behavioral engagement, coworker relational identification and emotional engagement, and coworker relational identification and behavioral engagement have increased. At the same time, the correlation between emotional engagement and behavioral engagement is confirmed. The specific results are shown in Table 3.
Analysis of Calculation Results
According to the calculation results, considering the direct correlation and indirect correlation between each latent variable, and based on the standardized coefficient, results of the direct and indirect effects of psychological safety and relational identification on the engagement of young teachers were obtained, as shown in Table 4.
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Table 3. Hypothesis testing results of adjusted model.
Note: *(p < 0.05), **(p < 0.01), ***(p < 0.001).
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Table 4. Direct effect, indirect effect and total effect.
5. Discussion
Findings
In terms of the motivation of emotional engagement, the improvement of psychological safety can help to enhance the emotional identification and willingness to work of young teachers. It can be seen that a more relaxed working atmosphere can reduce young teachers’ fear of risk and failure, and relieve their anxiety at work. Meanwhile, there are certain differences in the influence of the two types of relational identification on emotional engagement, and the teacher-student relationship has a stronger impact on the willingness of young teachers to devote themselves to work. It shows that the characteristics of student-facing and attaching importance to the exchange of ideas and knowledge make young teachers more concerned about harmonious relationships and sincere communication with students.
The above results prove that the peaceful working mentality of young teachers can offset the negative impact of life pressure to a certain extent, so as to maintain their work enthusiasm with the salary remains unchanged and achieve a win-win situation between universities and teachers. When considering interpersonal relationships, with the exception of a few administrative positions, the connections among young teachers in teaching and research positions mainly exists in the form of project teams. Therefore, although the degree of harmony between young teachers has a positive impact on their work cognition, the relatively loose coworker relationship makes young teachers tend to concern about their relationships with student groups.
In terms of the motivation of behavioral engagement, the results show that the influence of coworker relational identification on behavioral engagement is the most obvious. And in practice, the judgment of the atmosphere of mutual support between coworkers determines the actions of young teachers in their work. Meanwhile, due to the lack of team support for young teachers, many project-based activities need the participate of students, so a good teacher-student relationship also helps to strengthen teachers’ confidence in carrying out various tasks. Unlike the strong influence of relational identification on behavioral engagement, psychological safety is weakly correlated with behavioral engagement directly. Therefore, although the relatively relaxed management system and team atmosphere can enhance the willingness of young teachers to work, in the absence of clear institutional constraints, their work performance and work intensity cannot be guaranteed, the inconsistency of “know it” and “do it” is likely to occur.
By comparing the calculation results before and after model modification, it can be found that the correlation between the emotional engagement and the behavior engagement of young teachers is weak, that is, there is a limited consistency between subjective work enthusiasm and objective work behavior. On the one hand, the above results show that emotions and behaviors can be used as two evaluation dimensions of engagement to achieve a comprehensive measure of the engagement of young teachers. On the other hand, it also reflects the obvious difference between the incentive mechanism of emotional investment and behavioral investment in work, and it cannot simply be thought that motivating teachers can ensure higher performance output.
With the consent of the respondents, we conducted a follow-up survey of 115 young teachers who participated in the survey in the early stage, using one-on-one interviews to focus on the obstacles to the transformation of work emotions into work behavior. After analysis of the interview content, five main reasons of the inconsistency between emotional engagement and behavioral engagement were concluded, taking the frequency of occurrence as the standard, which are conflicts between family and career, financial stress, unreasonable work distribution, lack of institutional fairness and difficulty of work. The specific results are shown in Table 5. It can be seen that when designing the incentive mechanism for young teachers, administrators at universities not only need to consider the emotional satisfaction of young teachers, but also pay attention to the life pressure of young teachers and optimizing the fairness and effectiveness of the system.
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Table 5. Results of a survey of obstacles to the transformation of work emotions into work behavior.
Implications for Practice
Considering the results of the calculations and the survey results of the follow-up interview, it can be found that there is a significant relationship between psychological safety, relational identification and engagement of young teachers. On this basis, following strategic suggestions are put forward in this paper.
First, quantitative analysis techniques of personality traits and ability structures should be introduced into the recruitment process. The results show that the improvement of psychological safety and relational identification can help to improve the engagement attitude of young teachers. Both psychological safety and relational identification are variables that can reflect the psychological state of young teachers. On the one hand, the formation and evolvement of such perceptions are strongly influenced by the institutional characteristics and the working environment. On the other hand, under the present management situation, administrators at universities should pay attention to the young candidates with a positive mentality who are competent for work. Their participation can improve the overall person-job fit for faculty, which can lead to a higher level of work commitment from teachers. Person-job fit can be achieved through two ways, one is to select young teachers who match their jobs in the recruitment process, and the other is to improve the compatibility between the ability, perception of young teachers and their job through post-entry training. For the latter, the human resources department of universities has attached importance to and designed the diversified concept shaping and skills training system for in-service teachers. For the former, in the current recruitment process, the analysis of person-job fit in universities relies more on the behavior of the interview process and the comprehensive evaluation of academic achievements.
Nowadays, an important development trend of modern human resource management practice is to pay attention to the in-depth application of psychoanalytic tools. In the process of talent selection and recruitment of various organizations, the scale of personality traits and ability structure has gradually received the attention of the human resource department, and plays an increasingly important role in the early screening stage. Therefore, in the recruitment of university teachers, quantitative analysis techniques for personality traits and ability structures can also be introduced to help human resource department in the selection stage, so as to attract and recruit people who are more suitable for the development needs of school and the requirements of work. In practice, universities have great advantages in implementing the above strategies. Universities can make full use of the professional expertise of teachers in related majors, establish special research topics and provide financial support, develop corresponding personality test scales or assignment evaluation algorithms, and combine personality analysis with person-job fit evaluation to provide intellectual support for the recruitment of young teachers. If necessary, personnel selection programs and psychological intervention techniques for young teachers could be developed through the use of external specialized research institutions in the form of function outsource or single-item projects.
Second, combine the orientation of the school-running and the individual characteristics of the teachers to carry out different career planning. Both orientation of school-running and the ability of teachers need to be considered to achieve sustainable and healthy development of universities. Represented by the “211” project, the “985” project, and the “double first-class” project, and guided by the orientation of school-running, Chinese universities divide the level of running schools, build differentiated school running goals, and design targeted management systems. The difference in the orientation of different schools also leads to the differences in acquisition, allocation and use of resources, and also affects the recruitment, management and motivation of teachers. For example, in the research process of this paper, it is found that young teachers working in “double first-class” university tend to focus on scientific research work, and their salary, career development are more related to their scientific research performance. Young teachers serving in such schools often spend a lot of energy chairing or participating in various research projects and often publish high-level papers. Correspondingly, the tasks of scientific research and teaching are relatively balanced in ordinary universities, and the combination of theory and practice is more emphasized in junior colleges. Meanwhile, the basic demands and working styles of young teachers also vary greatly due to their different education backgrounds, genders, majors and years of service. For example, the highly educated teachers tend to work in research-oriented tasks. Female teachers have less disposable working hours as they take on more family responsibilities. Majors affect the working habits and ideas of young teachers. Young teachers with long working years but poor career development are more likely to have the feeling of burnout or career crisis. Therefore, to achieve long-term incentives for young teachers, it is necessary to carry out different career planning based on the orientation of school-running and individual characteristics of teachers.
In practice, analysis of job supply and demand for specific age groups, design of job development goals, design of job management plans and the design of system evaluation mechanisms are need to be implemented in proper order. Specifically, in the job supply and demand analysis stage, the orientation of schools, various resources that can be used to motivate young teachers, and the state of human resources are the key factors that need to be paid attention to. In the stage of job development goals design, it is necessary to consider the school’s strategic planning and young talent reserves, to clarify the priorities of management and the career path of young teachers. In the stage of the system design and evaluation, it is necessary to take into account the development of the school and individual characteristics of young teachers, and develop realistic and feasible management systems for young teachers of different levels and departments.
Third, create a positive interpersonal atmosphere with a system of protection for the growth of young teacher. The results show that highly inclusive work environment is conducive to enhancing the engagement of young teachers. Coworker relational identification and teacher-student relational identification also have a significant impact on engagement of young teachers. Therefore, a good and positive interpersonal atmosphere can stimulate the enthusiasm of young teachers effectively. However, due to the dual pressures of life and work, young teachers are often reluctant to spend too much energy on the maintenance of interpersonal relationships. At the same time, the disadvantages of work qualifications and status make it impossible for young teachers to build their own cooperative teams in the short term. Through interviews and surveys, it can be found that utilitarian communication motivations, indifferent interpersonal relationships, and decreased organizational loyalty have emerged in some young teacher groups.
Therefore, it is necessary for the relevant departments of universities to design a proper growth protection mechanism to create a positive interpersonal atmosphere and help young teachers build harmonious and healthy interpersonal relationships. Firstly, customized performance appraisal and salary protection system for young teachers are need. Moderate tension and positive working emotions are the basis for building a harmonious interpersonal atmosphere. By setting duration of protection of performance for young teachers, reducing the annual assessment pressure and providing a higher level of salary, it can alleviate the anxiety and short-sighted behavior of young teachers effectively, so that they can have a more peaceful attitude to interact with people and choose the collaborators they want. Secondly, a support plan for team of young teachers can be designed through information promotion, financial support, team assessment, etc., to help young teachers integrate into the existing research and teaching teams. Besides, encouraging young teachers to build new teams according to their research directions and tasks, so as to improve the loose relationship between young teachers. Finally, the management system for cooperative projects between teachers and students need to be improved. On the one hand, young teachers and students should be encouraged to cooperate in undertaking teaching and scientific research tasks, and a formal platform for teacher-student cooperation should be built. On the other hand, it is appropriate to improve the autonomy of young teachers to award credits or other reasonable rewards in teacher-student cooperation projects, it can not only stimulate students’ enthusiasm for learning, but also reduce the work pressure of young teachers, thus creating a good interactive atmosphere for teachers and students.
6. Conclusion
This study investigated the correlation mechanism between psychological safety, relational identification and engagement among young teachers from the perspective of interpersonal context in organizations. The results showed that there were significant positive correlations between psychological safety, relational identification and young teachers’ engagement. Specifically, the impact of psychological safety on the emotional engagement of young teachers is more significant. Meanwhile, both coworker relational identification and teacher-student relational identification play a key role in improving the engagement of young teachers while with different ways. Of which, coworker relational identification is more closely related to behavioral engagement, and good teacher-student relationship is more conducive to stimulating the emotional engagement of young teachers. In addition, there is a positive correlation between emotional engagement and behavioral engagement, and the incentives for young teachers’ subjective engagement and behavioral engagement should be distinguished.
For the administrators of universities, it is necessary to pay attention to the psychological state of young teachers and the particularity of incentive strategies for young teachers. In order to stimulate the work enthusiasm of young teachers and improve their work engagement, quantitative analysis techniques of personality traits and ability structures could be introduced into the recruitment process, quantitative analysis techniques of personality traits and ability structures can be introduced into the recruitment process, different career planning can be carried out in combination with the orientation of the school-running and the individual characteristics, and positive interpersonal atmosphere could be created with the growth protection system of young teachers.
Supporting Projects
Scientific Research Program General Project of Tianjin Municipal Education Commission: “The Interaction between Psychological Safety and Engagement of Young Teachers in the Context of Multi-Directional Performance Appraisal: An Empirical Study Based on Universities in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei” (2018SK127).