The Relationship Between Professional Identity and Job Burnout Among Chinese Teachers: Mediating Roles of Career Satisfaction and Work Engagement

ABSTRACT Job burnout is becoming a major threat to teachers' work. Previous studies revealed that teachers' professional identity and job burnout are negatively related. This study explored the mediating effects of career satisfaction and work engagement in the relationship between teachers' professional identity and job burnout. Investigation materials included the Chinese version of the Teachers' Professional Identity Scale, Career Satisfaction Scale, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and Professional Quality of Life Scale. The cross‐sectional design was conducted in this study with 3147 teachers from kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools in Zhejiang Province, China. The PROCESS macro plug‐in SPSS21.0 was used for mediating effect analysis. These results indicated that teachers' professional identity, career satisfaction, and work engagement have significant, positive correlations with each other and significant negative correlations with job burnout. Meanwhile, results showed that career satisfaction and work engagement played parallel and sequentially mediating roles in the relationship between teachers' professional identity and burnout. These findings indicate that a high level of professional identity plays an important role in strengthening career satisfaction and increasing work engagement, which may effectively help teachers reduce job burnout.