As rapid and various social changes increase future uncertainty and decrease predictability, contemporary people are suffering from psychological problems, such as anxiety, stress, and psychological pressure. The need for professional counseling services in the personal life is increasing accordingly, which is getting obvious especially among those teenagers in the elementary, middle or high schools who should establish their new self-identities and decide their career paths. It has been a long time since the school counselor system was introduced and enforced to solve student problems, such as suicide, sexual violence, school violence, and juvenile delinquency. However, some new practical issues with regard to the school counselor system are appearing in our school education field. One of those issues is that school counselors are receiving unfair treatment, which decreases their job engagement and the effectiveness of school counselor system.
The purpose of this study was to examine the mediating effect of intrinsic motivation on the relationship between organizational justice and school counselors'' job engagement. For this purpose, school counselors from elementary, middle and high schools across the nation participated in a field study. By understanding school counselors’ practical problems through the concept of organizational justice, intrinsic motivation and job engagement, it was hypothesized that these problems could be explained with the relations among those concepts. In other words, it was assumed that the organizational injustices experienced by school counselors in their positions and roles would undermine their job engagement. However, it was also hypothesized that the negative effects of organizational injustice on job engagement would be substantially attenuated by increasing the level of intrinsic motivation among those school counselors. Therefore, the objective of the field study is to verify these hypotheses empirically.
To achieve the objective of this study, questionnaires were administrated to 313 school counselors in elementary, middle and high school across the nation. The questionnaire consisted of items to measure organizational justice, job engagement and intrinsic motivation of school organizations, and the personal information of participants including their gender, school name, and age. The data from this survey were computerized and analyzed with SPSS Statistics 21.0 and Amos 21.0. The statistical analysis program, SPSS Statistics 21.0, was used for descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, reliability analysis, and exploratory factor analysis; Amos 21.0 was used to validate measurement and research models, and to test the mediating effects of intrinsic motivation through bootstrapping procedures.
The findings of this study are as follows. The results of correlation analysis among measurement variables indicated that organizational justice had a positive correlation with intrinsic motivation and job engagement. The results of measurement model validation showed that the factor loading of all measurement variables was statistically significant. According to the results of mediating effect tests, all paths were statistically significant except the indirect effects of organizational justice on job engagement. Therefore, it has been proved that intrinsic motivation plays an important role in increasing job engagement. And the limitation of the findings and suggestions for further studies were also discussed.