Structural relationship among empowerment, teacher commitment, and
job satisfaction in elementary physical education teachers*

Nam, Heon
Department of Physical Education
Graduate school of Kyungpook National University
Daegu, Korea
(Supervised by professor Lee, Ansu.)
(Abstract)
The school site needs to reform school organization in response to social change. To this end, teachers are the subjects of school reform, and they are discussing ways to change and develop schools. In relation to this, the school perceives the effort and interest in teachers’ change as an important mediator for the development of the education and unit schools are changing through the autonomous participation of teachers. Teacher empowerment is a concept that is presented as a way to increase the autonomy, interest, and dedication of teachers. Therefore, the purpose of the study, we try to clarify the actual part of the school field by examining the relationship among teacher empowerment as a factor of input, teaching commitment as a process factor, and job satisfaction as a result factor.
The populations consist of 487 physical teachers in 422 elementary schools in G-do and D-metropolitan city, and 437 teachers were sampled classifying teachers'' gender, teacher efficacy, physical teacher efficacy, level of education, major and position. As for the measurement tool of teacher empowerment, this researcher used ''The School participant Empowerment Scale'' by Short & Rinehart(1992) after correcting and supplementing it and it''s consisted with 5 sub factors decision-making, professionalism, position, self-efficacy, autonomy, influence(?=.651～.755). The teaching commitment instrument was developed by Mowday, Porter & Steers (1979) and it''s consisted with 3 sub factors loyalty, spontaneity and value acceptance(?=.680～.715). And the job satisfaction instrument was developed by Specter(1985) and it''s consisted with 6 sub factors promotion, benefits, dependable compensation, peer relationship, job itself, communication(?=.607～.784).
After individual input to a computer as an analysis of available data to coding guidelines, data processing was performed with correlation analysis, t-test, one-way ANOVA, regression analysis by using the IBM SPSS Statistics 23.0 program. In addition, Confirmatory Factor Analysis(CFA) was conducted using the Amos 21.0 program. In order to test the hypotheses about the structural relationship among physical education teachers'' empowerment, teacher commitment, and job satisfaction, a structural equation model(tructural Equation Modeling) was constructed and the fitness and hypothesis test results were derived.
The results of this study can be summarized as follows:
First, there was a significant difference in empowerment, teacher commitment, and job satisfaction according to background variables (regional, gender, academic ability, deepening process, job title, age, education career, physical education career, school size) of elementary physical education teachers. The sub factors of empowerment(decision making, expertise, position, self-efficacy, autonomy, and influence) and teacher commitment(loyalty, spontaneity, and acceptance of values) were significant differences in empowerment. However, there was no significant difference in teacher commitment according to background variables. In addition, the sub factors of job satisfaction such as promotion, benefits, dependent compensation, peer relationship, job self, communication showed significant differences.
Second, causality among empowerment, teacher commitment, and job satisfaction were significant. As a result of analyzing the causal relationship between the empowerment and the teacher commitment, the sub factors of empowerment(decision making, position, self-efficacy, autonomy, influence) were causality with significance in the sub factors of the teacher commitment(loyalty, spontaneity, acceptance of value). However, empowerment expertise did not show a significant causal relationship to teacher commitment. As a result of analyzing the causal relationship between empowerment and job satisfaction, the sub factors of empowerment such as decision making, professionalism, position, self-efficacy, autonomy and influence showed significant relationship to job satisfaction(promotion, welfare, dependant reward, peer relationship, job itself, and communication). Also as a result of analyzing the casual relationship between teacher commitment and job satisfaction, the sub factors of teacher commitment such as self-efficacy, loyalty, and acceptance of value showed a significant casal relationship on sub factors of job satisfaction such as promotion, welfare, dependent reward, peer relationship, job itself, and communication.
Third, the structural relationship among empowerment, teacher commitment, and job satisfaction showed a significant structural relationship. And the path of empowerment to teacher commitment, teacher commitment to job satisfaction had positive effects. And the direct effects of empowerment on job satisfaction were not significant, and the indirect effect was not significant.