Fatores psicossociais, satisfação com o trabalho e adoecimento de professores no Brasil e em Portugal

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Teaching profession is considered one of the most stressful occupations and can result in medical leaves, functional adaptations, and absenteeism, leading to impairments in teaching performance. Psychosocial factors at work refer to interactions between the environment, conditions, organization, management, content, and individual characteristics of workers. These factors can cause health damage and impact performance and job satisfaction. Therefore, recognizing the causes and health issues in the teacher population represents a significant advancement to gain a broader understanding of the problem situation and its relationship with work. OBJECTIVES: 1) to investigate associations between the illness of basic education teachers and psychosocial factors at work. 2) to analyze the negative impact of work on self-perceived physical and mental health among Brazilian and Portuguese teachers and the association with sociodemographic and work-related factors. 3) to identify groups of teachers who perceive the negative impact of work on physical and mental health in Brazil (BRA) and Portugal (POR) based on their common characteristics. METHODS: The methodology is divided into two stages. The first stage consisted of a systematic review study (Article 1), and the second stage (Articles 2 and 3) was an observational, cross-sectional, quantitative study, using data from Brazilian and Portuguese teachers in the final years of elementary education (6th to 9th grade) who participated in the international survey Teaching and Learning International Survey - TALIS in the year 2018. Teachers who also served as principals, substitute teachers, on long-term leave, and those exclusively teaching adults were excluded. The response variables were self-perceived impact of work on physical and mental health. For data analysis, responses were grouped into two dichotomous options: little/none or much/quite a lot. Sociodemographic variables, psychosocial factors, stress, and job satisfaction were analyzed. Descriptive analyses and univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis were performed for each outcome and country, adopting a significance level of 5%. Subsequently, cluster analysis associated with cluster adherence was performed using machine learning (ML) for variables such as sociodemographic characteristics, occupational factors, psychosocial work factors, job satisfaction, and negative impact of work on physical and mental health. RESULTS: The systematic literature review identified that common mental disorders, musculoskeletal pain, and Burnout Syndrome are significantly associated with low social support, high workload, high job demand, low job control, organizational climate, role ambiguity, stressful work conditions, effort-reward imbalance, low family support, relational demands (teacher-parent-student), bullying, and job security. The results of the observational study involved 5,680 Brazilian and Portuguese teachers. Six hundred and seven Brazilian teachers (27.3%) and 2,061 Portuguese teachers (59.5%) reported perceiving much or quite a lot of impact of work on physical health. Regarding mental health, 598 Brazilian teachers (27.0%) and 2,247 Portuguese teachers (64.9%) perceived much or quite a lot of impact attributed to work. Factors associated with these impacts, for both outcomes, include being female, aged 40-59 years, having more than 11 years of career, lacking time for personal life, dissatisfaction with work, salary, and rewards received, feeling stressed, lack of support from colleagues, and undervaluation of work by society. Regarding the clusters found, a group of teachers was identified who perceive the negative impact of work on physical and mental health for both BRA and POR. In both countries, teachers characteristics are similar except for age and total career time. Therefore, these teachers are characterized by teaching experience in the school ≤5 years, not actively participating in school decisions, not sharing responsibilities in school matters, not sharing ideas about teaching, not receiving school encouragement to lead new initiatives, not having a good relationship between teacher and student, not receiving support from colleagues, not believing that the profession is valued, expressing overall dissatisfaction with work, salary, and rewards received, and lacking time for personal life. In BRA, teachers are aged up to 39 years and have a total career time of ≤ 10 years. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the studies identified associations between the illness of teachers and psychosocial factors related to work organization. The results highlighted factors associated with these impacts including sociodemographic characteristics such as gender and age, as well as aspects related to the work environment, time for personal life, job satisfaction and compensation, stress, and social support from colleagues. It is hoped that the results found can contribute to directing improvements, measures, and specific actions related to organization and work-related factors, and to the development of practices aimed at teachers in order to help prevent health impairments in these workers.