TEACHER SELF-EFFICACY AS A MEDIATOR OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONAL COMPETENCE AND PRESCHOOL TEACHERS’ COMMITMENT

Background and Purpose: Since preschool education is the cornerstone of change and overall development of children, it is a very important phase that prepares them before they enter the school world. Thus, the development and expansion of preschool programs need to be given further attention and improvement of the quality of services to the community. Teachers' emotional competence and self-efficacy are closely related to teacher commitment. Therefore, it is important for us to identify the relationship between preschool teachers’ emotional competence and teachers' commitment as well as to investigate the mediating effect of teachers’ self-efficacy to perform their role toward developing children's potential holistically. This study aims to examine the mediating effect of teachers’ self-efficacy between the relationship of emotional competence and self-efficacy of teachers with the commitment of preschool teachers in the state of Selangor, Malaysia. This study was based on the Emotional Competency Theory developed by Goleman (2001), the Self-Efficacy Model by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy (2001) as well as the Teacher Commitment Model by Thien et al. (2014). Methodology: The methodology used was a survey study involving 428 preschool teachers in the state of Selangor who were selected through cluster sampling and convenient sampling to answer a set of questionnaire through Google Forms. The instrument was validated by six experts and a pilot study was conducted on 75 samples of preschool teachers in the Klang district. Data collected were analyzed quantitatively using IBM SPSS V23.0 & Smart-PLS 3.0. Findings: The results of structural model analysis showed that the relationship between emotional competence, self-efficacy and commitment was positively significant and teacher self-efficacy served as a partially mediating effect in the relationship between emotional competence and teacher commitment. Contributions: The previous studies of emotional competence, self-efficacy, and commitment were in the field of education in general and did not focus on preschool education. Based on the issues and long-term implications of the quality of preschool education, this study provided an improved new model to fill the research gap in the field of early childhood education to improve the quality of continuing education. Keywords: Commitment, early childhood education, emotional competence, mediator, preschool teacher, self-efficacy. Cite as: Phaik Im, K., Fong Peng, C., & Hutagalung, F. D. (2023). Teacher self-efficacy as a mediator of the relationship between emotional competence and preschool teachers’ commitment. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(2), 1-26. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss2pp1-26