How to keep teachers healthy and growing: The influence of job demands and resources

Purpose – Education depends on high-quality teachers who are committed to professional development anddo not get burned out. The purpose of this paper was to investigate how job demands and resources can affectthe health and cognitive development of teachers using the Demand-Induced Strain Compensation model. Design/methodology/approach – A cross-sectional sample of 120 teachers in vocational education wasused to investigate the proposed relationships and hypotheses with Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressionmethod. Findings – In terms of teacher health and development, significant main effects were found for severalpredictors. Autonomy was significantly and negatively related to emotional exhaustion. Autonomy, emotionalsupervisor and colleague support were significantly and positively related to teachers’ development. However,little support was found for matching hypotheses, suggesting that matching demands and resources do not offermore explanatory power for occupation outcomes than other types of interaction effects. Research limitations/implications – More powerful analyses techniques like structural equationmodeling could be used in future research with a larger sample size. A second limitation is common methodvariance. Practical implications – Schools in vocational education should provide sufficient job resources, such asautonomy and emotional support, but possibly also put a limit on teacher task variety. Originality/value – Job demands and resources have until now mainly been related to negative outcomessuch as poor health and ill-being, while the relationship with learning has also been hypothesized and istherefore meaningful to examine. In addition, it was investigated whether interaction effects of matchin gdemands and resources, better explain these outcomes.