Job satisfaction and self-efficacy of in-service early childhood teachers in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era

Although the global COVID-19 pandemic has drawn public attention to the ecology of teachers’ work, little is known about how external and internal factors interact and affect early childhood teachers’ job satisfaction and self-efficacy. The purpose of this study is to examine how the external ecology of kindergartens and individual personality traits affect the job satisfaction and self-efficacy of in-service early childhood teachers in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era through a self-reporting questionnaire distributed among 237 kindergarten teachers in online and offline learning community groups. It was found that the job satisfaction of early childhood teachers was a significant predictor of self-efficacy and played a partially mediating role between personality traits and self-efficacy. Furthermore, personality traits are considered significant predictors of job satisfaction and self-efficacy in Chinese early childhood teachers, and it was noted that these teachers were the least satisfied in terms of pay and promotion. With these findings, this study contributes to the job satisfaction and self-efficacy literature by validating their causal associations in the field of early childhood teachers. Our findings also provide guidelines for practitioners and policymakers in promoting early childhood teacher credentialing and external social support to enhance job satisfaction and self-efficacy. The unique value of this study lies in the clarification of how the work environment and ecology of early childhood teachers in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era influenced self-efficacy and of personality traits being the underlying attributions that led to this result.