Teacher shortages have, over the years, become one of the key issues in most educational systems, affecting both the development of educational policy and the daily functioning of educational institutions (Symeonidis et al., 2025). The recent UNESCO Global Report on Teachers addressing the shortage indicates that 44 million teachers are needed in primary and secondary education in order to achieve SDG-4 (UNESCO & International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, 2024). 

Against this backdrop, researchers have increasingly focused on teachers’ sense of autonomy as a potential lever for improving teachers job satisfaction and consequently job retention. Autonomy is commonly defined as an individual’s sense of volition, choice, and self-endorsement of action, reflecting the extent to which one experiences one’s behaviour as self-congruent and meaningful (Ryan & Deci, 2017). However, as Vangrieken et al. (2017) note, autonomy in educational research has often been interpreted through a predominantly individualistic lens – emphasising independence, resistance to external influence, and self-governance. This understanding, described as reactive autonomy, foregrounds individualism rather than collaboration.

An alternative conceptualisation, increasingly visible in recent literature, frames autonomy as inherently relational. This perspective, referred to as reflective autonomy, emphasises interdependence and the freedom to self-govern and make personal choices in relation to one's feelings and values (Vangrieken et al., 2017). Such an understanding is more closely aligned with Self-Determination Theory, which conceptualises autonomy and relatedness as mutually reinforcing rather than competing needs. From this viewpoint, teachers’ autonomy is not diminished—but rather supported—through collaboration. By seeking social support from school principals and colleagues, teachers build meaningful professional relationships and experience a stronger sense of connection at work (Maas et al., 2022). Empirical studies demonstrate the benefits of collaboration and support-seeking, including increased job satisfaction (Tims et al., 2013) and greater fulfillment of the need for relatedness (Bakker & Oerlemans, 2019). 

However, given the diversity of national and organisational cultures, it cannot be assumed that reflective and reactive autonomy relate to teacher retention in the same way across different countries. Motivation for the profession is shaped, among other factors, by the alignment between individuals’ needs and values and the norms, expectations, and forms of support embedded in their sociocultural environment. From this perspective, teachers’ experiences of reactive and reflective autonomy, and their relationship with teacher retention, are likely to be culturally situated rather than universally equivalent. To capture these contextual differences, the study draws on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions, focusing on individualism–collectivism, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 2011). These dimensions were selected because they are conceptually linked to how autonomy and social relationships are structured in educational settings. Furthermore, the inclusion of these dimensions is supported by previous research demonstrating that power distance orientation affects the relationship between perceived autonomy and burnout (Guo et al., 2023), individualism and uncertainty avoidance influence job satisfaction (Jang et al., 2018), and collectivist cultures in learning contexts favour collaboration, while individualist cultures emphasise independence (Ouyang, 2025).

Building on these considerations, this study is aimed at examining the relationship between teachers’ job satisfaction—used as a proxy for teacher retention—and their sense of  autonomy in teaching and openness to collaboration with other colleagues within school. We further investigated whether these relationships are shaped by the cultural characteristics of the country in which teachers work. To address this aim, the study was guided by the following research questions:

RQ1. Which distinct clusters of teachers can be identified based on autonomy in teaching and the exchange of information and ideas among teachers?
RQ2. Does the distribution of teacher clusters vary across cultural groups?
RQ3. Do teacher clusters differ in job satisfaction, and do these differences vary across cultural groups?

The study employed a three-step analytical strategy to examine the interplay between cultural context, teacher autonomy and collaboration, and job satisfaction. To ensure the inclusion of national contexts that differed meaningfully in their cultural profiles, a hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) was conducted at the country level using Hofstede’s dimensions of Individualism (IND), Power Distance (PD), and Uncertainty Avoidance (UA). Ward’s method with squared Euclidean distance was applied. Inspection of the dendrogram indicated a four-cluster solution, with clusters differing meaningfully across the three cultural dimensions. Based on this solution, one country representing each cluster was selected. Countries were chosen on the basis of their highest probability of cluster membership, as indicated by the discriminant analysis results. The selected countries were Denmark (IND-high, PD-low, UA-low), Serbia (IND-average, PD-high, UA-high), Singapore (IND-average, PD-high, UA-low), and Belgium (IND-high, PD-average, UA-high). The second step included analyses based on TALIS 2024 data from 14,446 teachers across the selected countries. Teachers were clustered using the same HCA procedure as in Step 1 but based on two measures: (1) Autonomy of teaching, a 4-item scale related to the freedom of choice in classroom (e.g. lesson planning) and (2) Exchange of information and ideas, operationalised as a 3-item scale addresses the exchange of teaching materials, ideas, and information about students’ learning and assessment practices among teachers (OECD, 2025). Discriminant analysis was conducted to assess the distinctiveness of the resulting clusters and the accuracy of teacher classification. To examine the invariance of the cluster structure across national contexts, HCA were conducted both on the full sample and separately within each country subsample. The resulting dendrograms and cluster centroids indicated a comparable cluster solution across the full sample and country-level subsamples, supporting the interpretability and cross-contextual stability of the clusters. Although cluster centroids were not numerically identical across samples, the overall cluster patterns and relative positioning of clusters along the two dimensions were consistent, indicating configural rather than metric equivalence of the cluster solutions across countries. A chi-square test of independence with Cramér’s V for large samples was used to examine the association between teacher cluster membership and cultural context. In the third step, differences in job satisfaction—assessed using a 7-item scale capturing satisfaction with the working environment and the teaching profession—were examined across teacher clusters using a univariate GLM. To test cross-cultural variation, interaction effects between teacher cluster membership and country cultural cluster were included in the model.

Cluster analyses identified four teacher clusters across cultural contexts, with cluster membership distributions differing significantly across cultural groups (Cramér’s V = .83), indicating pronounced cross-national differences in the prevalence of teacher clusters. The first cluster, labeled Autonomous Individualists (i.e. Reactive Autonomous teachers), most prevalent in Denmark (≈45%), encompassed teachers who reported relatively high levels of autonomy in instruction combined with low levels of exchange of ideas among teachers, suggesting autonomy exercised primarily at the individual level rather than through collaborative practices. The second cluster, Autonomous Collaborators (i.e. Reflective Autonomous teachers), was most common in Serbia and Singapore (≈23–24%), included teachers characterized by high sense of autonomy in instruction alongside high levels of exchange of ideas among teachers, reflecting a pattern in which professional autonomy co-occurs with collaboration and information sharing. The third cluster, Controlled Collaborators, predominated in Belgium (≈34%) and consisted of teachers reporting lower instructional autonomy while tending to participate actively in exchanges with colleagues. Finally, the fourth cluster, Controlled Individualists, most frequent in Singapore (≈33%), comprised teachers scoring low on both instructional autonomy and exchange of ideas among teachers, reflecting a constrained professional context with limited individual discretion and collaborative engagement. Results indicate that teachers who combine high levels of instructional autonomy with frequent exchange of ideas and information with colleagues consistently report the highest levels of job satisfaction across countries examined. In contrast, autonomy exercised primarily in isolation, without strong collegial engagement, is associated with substantially lower satisfaction, underscoring the limited motivational value of autonomy when detached from relational professional contexts. The least satisfied with their jobs were teachers from Controlled Individualists clusters. While the overall pattern appears across countries, the relative distances between clusters in job satisfaction differ, indicating that the extent to which cluster membership distinguishes levels of job satisfaction varies by national context.

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