Unlocking Teacher Job Satisfaction During the COVID-19 Pandemic: a Multi-criteria Satisfaction Analysis

Research has so far made a rather limited advancement in identifying the contribution of the aspects of the working environment that matter to teachers’ overall job satisfaction (TJS), as well as in providing evidence-based guidelines for improving their working experience. Addressing these deficiencies, the current work uses data related to school working environment facets, i.e., opportunities for self-fulfillment, work intensity/load, salary/income, leadership and collegial relations, and overall TJS, from a sample of 438 public primary school teachers in Greece and applies a multi-criteria decision analysis method (the multi-criteria satisfaction analysis (MUSA)) to identify the contribution of these facets to overall TJS, underline the strong and weak points of TJS based on their importance for teachers and the school’s performance on them, and provide direct action implications for improving primary TJS. The results reveal that all the examined facets are crucial for TJS. Yet, self-fulfillment is the most important contributor to overall TJS and work intensity/load the least significant one. Also, self-fulfillment is the strongest point of TJS that school leaders and policymakers should continue investing on, whilst salary/income is a risk factor that could easily turn into a threat for TJS into the future.