Teaching comes with a great deal of stress and emotional challenges, and is often considered one of the most stressful professions (Maslach et al., 2001). Research suggests that work-related stress combined with the lack of personal and organizational resources for coping with it is one of the primary reasons teachers decide to leave the profession (Montgomery & Rupp, 2005). Consequently, teacher attrition is becoming a growing challenge for educational systems internationally, with aspects of occupational well-being proving central for the decision to leave the teaching profession (OECD, 2020; Schaufeli & Bakker, 2004). In Croatia, around a third of teachers express the desire to leave the teaching profession (Radeka & Sorić, 2006), and, as well as many other European countries, Croatia is beginning to face the problem of recruiting, hiring, and retaining teachers (European Commission, 2018; Katsarova, 2020; Marušić et al., 2017). Therefore, raising awareness about teachers’ occupational well-being and implementing policies to support it can be beneficial not only for teachers and their students, but for entire educational systems and communities.

Since teacher attrition has significant consequences at the system level, research has been dedicated to identifying teachers who are at the highest risk of leaving the profession. According to analyses of teacher attrition, 40-50% of teachers decide to leave the teaching profession during the first 5 years of their careers (Ingersoll & Merrill, 2013; Perda, 2013). This suggests that attrition rates are especially high in early-career teachers, who often have difficulties making the transition from their initial education to work due to the amount of stress they are faced with in their beginning years of teaching. Meanwhile, not much attention is directed to occupational health and well-being of teachers and supporting them in this aspect through pre-service and in-service training. This points to the importance of identifying predictors of the decision to leave the teaching profession, in order to provide support to young teachers during their transition into the profession and thus contribute to the prevention of early-career teachers’ attrition through strengthening their commitment to the profession.

One way to foster teachers’ occupational well-being and their motivation to stay in the profession is through strengthening their social and emotional competencies (SEC): their self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship skills. Teachers' SEC are related to their occupational well-being by influencing how teachers cope with emotional challenges in their everyday work (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). This points to social and emotional competencies as potential psychological resources that can alleviate negative outcomes such as burnout and leaving the profession in early-career teachers (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2000; Mérida-López et al., 2020). However, research in this field has remained fragmented and has examined these competencies and relevant outcomes in isolation.

This research aims to investigate the relationships between early-career teachers’ social and emotional competencies, burnout and teacher commitment. We will first examine SEC as predictors of teacher commitment, under the hypothesis that teachers with lower SEC are less likely to stay in the teaching profession. We will further explore burnout as a potential mediator of the relationship between SEC and teacher commitment, to examine whether teachers with lower SEC experience higher burnout and are therefore less likely to stay in the teaching profession.

The research presented in this abstract is part of a broader research project titled The role of personality, motivation and socio-emotional competences in early-career teachers' occupational well-being funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. Research was conducted in Croatia from October 2022 to January 2023. The invitation to participate was distributed to all elementary schools in Croatia, in order to include as many early-career teachers as possible. School principals and counsellors then forwarded the questionnaire to early-career teachers working in their schools. 534 lower secondary teachers with up to 5 years of teaching experience participated in the research by completing an online questionnaire. The research was conducted according to ethical standards and with the approval obtained by the Ethics Committee of the authors’ institution. Teachers’ social and emotional competencies were measured by the Social and Emotional Competencies Questionnaire (SEC-Q) (Zych et al., 2018). The questionnaire consists of 16 items which measure four dimensions of social and emotional competencies, namely self-awareness, self-management and motivation, social awareness and prosocial behaviour, and decision making. Answers are given on a 5-point Likert type scale (1=Strongly disagree, 5=Strongly agree). All subscales had good reliability with Cronbach’s alphas measuring 0.85, 0.83, 0.78, 0.80, respectively, while the whole scale also demonstrated high reliability (Cronbach’s α = 0.88). Teacher burnout was measured by the Burnout Assesment Tool (Schaufeli et al., 2020). The questionnaire consists of 23 items which measure four core symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, mental distance, cognitive impairment, and emotional impairment. We used the total score as an indicator of teachers’ level of burnout. Answers are given on a 5-point frequency scale (1=Never, 5=Always). The scale demonstrated high reliability with Cronbach’s alpha score of 0.94. Teacher commitment was assessed using one item: How sure are you that you will continue working as a teacher? Answers were given on a 7-point Likert type scale (1=Not at all, 7=Completely). Higher values point to stronger commitment to staying in the teaching profession.

In order to analyse whether SEC predict early-career teachers’ commitment, a hierarchical regression analysis was conducted. Each of the dimensions of SEC was introduced into the model in separate steps, to be able to distinguish the individual contribution of each dimension. The analysis concluded that SEC explained 12% of the variance of teacher commitment, with all the steps of the model contributing significantly to the total amount of variance explained. Among the four SEC dimensions, self-management and motivation appeared to be the best predictor of teacher commitment, explaining approximately 8% of its variance. We then conducted separate mediation analyses for each of the predictors by using PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2018), to explore the role of burnout in the relationship between SEC and teacher commitment. Results suggest that burnout fully mediates the relationships between self-awareness, self-management and motivation, and decision making and teacher commitment. Early-career teachers with lower self-awareness, social awareness and prosocial behaviour, and decision making skills experience more symptoms of burnout, and are therefore more likely to leave the teaching profession. Burnout proved to significantly mediate the relationship between self-management and motivation and teacher commitment as well, however, the mediation was partial, which means that the direct effect of self-management and motivation on teacher commitment remained significant after controlling for burnout. This suggests that burnout is not the only mechanism underlying the relationship. Taken together, these findings support the notion that SEC can play an important role in the prevention of burnout, and consequently, teacher attrition, especially in the early years of working as a teacher. More attention should be given to strengthening teachers’ SEC and occupational well-being through their professional development, by placing emphasis on skills needed to successfully navigate through the emotional challenges which accompany the teaching profession.

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