Organisational characteristics of educational environments : the contribution of teachers' assessment

• The aim of this study is to explore the organisational characteristics of educational environments, to identify typologies of work environments and to investigate the relationships between the type of work environment and the school’s functioning. The Swedish version of the Organizational Checkup survey (Leiter & Maslach, 2000) is a general and expanded version of the Maslach burnout inventory. This study analyses the 16 items concerning Energy, Involvement and Accomplishment (Relation to work) and 29 items concerning Workload, Control, Reward, Community, Fairness and Values (Fields of work). The sample consists of 749 Swedish high school teachers from a stratified selection of 31 schools. The means of the answers from teachers from the same school were dichotomized and analysed with POSAC (Partial Order Scalogram Analyses). The polarizing variables contributing to the identification of four main profiles are Reward and Workload. The answers are also analysed with a SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) approach. The results show that there are differences in the work environment of teachers and that the variables from the Organizational Checkup survey that contribute most to these differences are Workload and Reward. The results are discussed in relation to the effort-reward imbalance theory. The results can contribute to a better understanding of significant differences in school’s organisational functioning, as they are perceived by the teachers, and they can be employed in planning adequate interventions.

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