Teachers’ Work Engagement and its Relationship With Their Individual and Social Well-Being: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

In this article, our primary aim is to explore the relationship between teachers’ engagement in teaching and their well-being in a contextualized manner given that teacher engagement does not exist in isolation from the social milieu in which teachers work. To this end, we build on the concept of work engagement developed by Schaufeli et al. (2006) and Seligman’s (2011) model of well-being. Our small-scale exploratory quantitative study (N = 58) involved both language teachers and teachers of other subjects working in public education in Hungary. Data were analyzed with the help of difference tests and correlational analyses. Although our results showed that the level of well-being experienced by teachers in Hungary was similar to that of an international, large-scale teacher sample (Sulis, Mairitsch, et al., 2022), work engagement was found to have few relationships with individual well-being factors and none with school-related social ones. Since our findings are largely in contrast with the results of previous empirical research on teacher well-being, we attempt to provide potential contextual, methodological, and theoretical reasons for them.