1. Introduction
To halt the spread of the COVID-19 virus, many countries around the world resorted to school closures. Data published by UNESCO showed that school closures reached their peak in early April 2020, thus affecting approximately 1.6 billion students across 194 countries, which accounts for at least 90% of total student enrollment [
1]. The sudden school closures forced teachers to find online and remote ways to support children’s learning and well-being in times of crises and disruption. Even in cases where schools were able to reopen, it has not been business as usual: teachers must deal with new health and safety regulations; many teachers are rightly concerned about the possible impact of COVID-19 on their health and safety; teachers have had to adapt their teaching to large groups of children who have missed out on learning and who struggle with socio-emotional well-being.
In response, many teachers had to reestablish workflow and adapt teaching practices in a short period, including having to hone technological and didactic skills and taking on the role of a learning manager. Accordingly, teachers identify primary concerns related to workload, a lack of support, and a lack of well-being or other psychological pressures to exit the profession. They express low job satisfaction with poor working conditions, thus implying burnout or coping struggles.
Burnout indicates that an individual has limited emotional and physical resources, that stressful work situations deplete these resources, and that when these resources are depleted, the individual, in this case, the teacher, is no longer able to function adequately [
2,
3]. Since burnout is an individual’s response, to remediate it, a person’s capacity to cope and adapt to challenging work needs to be fostered [
4,
5]. Thus, a call has been issued across a variety of occupational domains, including education, to increase employee resilience. Seaman and colleagues [
6] defined resilience in public health as the ability of individuals to endure, adapt, and generate new ways of thinking and functioning in times of challenge, ambiguity, or hardship, allowing individuals to not only recover but, more importantly, thrive beyond crisis. The World Health Organization [
7] also states that building resilience is a key factor in protecting and promoting health and well-being at both the individual and community levels.
Resilience has a number of positive effects for teacher education on a macro level, as well as for teachers and students on a micro-level. It specifically reduces job burnout and the mental health of teachers [
8]. As a result, teachers must develop resilience to raise their tolerance for harsh working conditions. Improving teacher resilience is dependent on teachers’ coping techniques or strategies, as well as personal factors that may incline them to act as mediators [
9]. Among the factors found in the literature, self-esteem [
10], dispositional hope [
11], mattering [
12], and crisis self-efficacy [
13] were found to play an important role in teacher resilience. According to Luthans et al. [
14], the three components of psychological capital, self-efficacy, hope, and resiliency, as well as their interrelationships, enhance resistance to psychological distress. In a prior study, personal resources such as self-efficacy were found to be a mediator between work stress and job burnout among teachers [
15].
As mentioned, self-esteem and mattering are two other personal factors that can influence teacher resilience. A previous study in Okinawa found a link between self-esteem and resiliency among teachers [
16]. Richards et al. [
17] also found perceived mattering is positively associated with resilience and inversely related to stress and burnout. In the same way, the effect of gender on individuals’ resilience is a matter of interest. Different studies point at how gender differences influence teachers’ core self-identities, namely personal and professional identities. Gender differences also play a role in adversity and resilience experiences lived by teachers [
18,
19]. Specifically, when teachers have a robust understanding of their own social identities, they tend to deal with adversity better.
To date, numerous studies have reported the link between self-reported resilience and positive outcomes, such as occupational well-being, psychosocial outcomes, commitment, and performance among teachers [
11,
20,
21,
22]. However, to address teacher stress and burnout amid COVID-19 through increased teacher resilience as advocated, it is important to adopt a critical and holistic approach with the caveat that not much is currently known about the contribution of self-esteem, dispositional hope, mattering, crisis self-efficacy, and gender to teacher resilience in the context of COVID-19 school closures. Thus, the first aim of this study was to examine the relationships between self-esteem, dispositional hope, mattering, and teacher resilience. The second aim of this study was to test the mediating role of crisis self-efficacy on the predictive relationships. In addition, this study aimed to seek the importance of gender differences in teacher resilience.
5. Discussion and Implications
The COVID-19 pandemic put online teaching and learning to the test, which induced the acceleration of the digitalization of school teaching. This study attempts to fill a research gap of investigating predictors of teacher resilience in the said context. While many studies focused on teachers’ stress, burnout, and general psychological well-being during the pandemic-restriction context [
67] in various countries [
68], to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to propose that self-esteem, dispositional hope, mattering, and crisis self-efficacy are valuable direct and indirect predictors of teacher resilience. This study also provides an account of the cumulative knowledge of how the impact of psychological factors on teacher resilience was affected by the moderating role of gender. Finally, this study was the first attempt to identify the influence of psychological factors on teacher resilience in the Malaysian context. Structural equation modeling with a partial least squares method was conducted to test the hypotheses. The findings of this study indicated that self-esteem, dispositional hope, and mattering explained 40.1% and 34.8% of the variance in crisis self-efficacy and teacher resilience, respectively.
Self-esteem is the first individual factor that was assumed to be a positive predictor of teacher resilience. The results of this study confirmed this hypothesis. This finding is consistent with previous research of Kurniawan et al. [
69] that found self-esteem as a significant positive predictor of resilience. It means that high self-esteem levels would have a connection with teacher resilience in the COVID-19 crisis. The framework of Terror Management Theory (TMT) can explain this relationship; when individuals experience surging distress, they tend to boost their self-esteem and self-perceived value so that their psychological health can be preserved [
70].
Dispositional hope also significantly influenced the teacher resilience, analogous with Yıldırım and Arslan’s [
34] cross-section study which reported the correlation between dispositional hope and adult resilience at the onset of COVID-19. Therefore, teachers who keep their hopes high display higher recovery ability in highly stressful situations, and this facilitates increased resilience. Teachers with high dispositional hope are highly motivated with an ability to plan alternatives in light of challenges in teaching remotely during COVID-19 restrictions. These teachers have a deep belief that they are in control and can overcome the situation and difficulties. Holding such beliefs can lead to improved psychological health in teachers. Yıldırım and Arslan [
34] suggested that it is important to develop online training programs that focus on hope and resilience to cater to those who have minimal contact with people. These programs can ensure the psychological health of those vulnerable to the risk of COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown.
Moreover, the impact of mattering on teacher resilience was significant, and the results are consistent with past research [
71]. Extant evidence indicates that if mattering levels are low, the individual is more vulnerable to elevated depression levels [
72]. Flett et al.’s [
73] exploration on the mattering–perfectionism–depression link confirmed the correlation of higher depressive symptoms, reduced mattering, and increased levels of trait perfectionism and perfectionistic self-presentation. Observations reported that volunteering in meaningful ways fosters mattering [
74], so ample volunteer opportunities should be created for teachers, especially among those who have few social connections and work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, this study showed that crisis self-efficacy was a significant predictor of teacher resilience, which is consistent with the previous research of Yada et al. [
75] and Kim and Burić [
76]. The finding of this study indicates that teachers’ crisis self-efficacy drives them towards resilience. Teachers’ high efficacy belief in effectively managing unforeseen circumstances at work caused by the pandemic is a predictor of their high resilience to fulfill their professional and pedagogical functions and responsibilities in school. Chun [
77] suggested that agility and adaptability training should be provided to teachers to face unanticipated work changes. Additionally, schools can develop more effective message strategies to enhance teachers’ crisis self-efficacy as a means to safeguard teachers, parents, students, and stakeholders from the risks of COVID-19 in the educational system.
The analysis also revealed that crisis self-efficacy mediated the effects of self-esteem and dispositional hope on teacher resilience. These results support past research that showed a positive association between self-esteem, dispositional hope, and resilience, as well as self-efficacy playing the mediator role [
78]. In the recent development of the positive appraisal style theory of resilience (PASTOR), self-efficacy has been recognized as an important mechanism to attain resilience [
79,
80]. The findings also confirm that teachers with high self-esteem and hope are more likely to have high self-efficacy in difficult situations and eventually achieve resilience. It is observed that teachers’ self-belief in ability significantly influences their capability to not only maintain psychological and physical well-being but also to adapt to the challenges imposed by COVID-19.
The analysis also revealed that teacher resilience was gender-dependent and confirmed the moderating role of gender in teacher resilience. In terms of dispositional hope, female teachers had a higher resilience level than male teachers. Surprisingly, the results contradict previous findings [
81,
82]. These studies found no significant gender differences in the relationship between hope and resilience. This is because, according to Braun-Lewensohn et al. [
81], female teachers are very important and influential in communal and household spheres in collectivist societies such as Malaysia. As a result, in times of stress or crisis, the responsibility they bear obligates them to act optimally, and as a result, they do not expose themselves to vulnerability. However, in terms of self-esteem these findings revealed that male teachers were more resilient. This conclusion is reinforced by previous meta-analytic evidence that men consistently outperform women in terms of self-esteem [
83].
7. Conclusions
The findings of this study revealed that to raise the resilience of teachers working during the COVID-19 pandemic, their self-esteem, hope, and mattering need to be improved. The results also indicate that crisis self-efficacy mediates the mentioned variables (i.e., self-esteem and hope) and teacher resilience. In addition, this research is expected to help us understand the role of gender in teacher resilience. It is found that male teachers had a higher teacher resilience level for dispositional hope than female teachers. In contrast, for self-esteem, female teachers had a higher level of teacher resilience than male teachers. Therefore, special attention should be paid to cultivating and developing teachers’ psychological attributes, particularly self-esteem, to enhance their resilience. With the findings of this study, it is hoped that all stakeholders will double up their efforts to improve and maintain the resiliency level of teachers who are coping with work challenges imposed by the COVID-19 crisis.