Personal sense of responsibility and work engagement in a sample of Italian high-school teachers.

Over the past twenty years, educational policies across Western countries have focused on improving the quality of education, placing new demands on teachers, increasing their responsibilities and widening their duties. Recent research has begun to focus on the link between teachers’ responsibility and their behavioural, motivational and emotional correlates. This study was designed to explore contextual and personal dimensions, including teachers’ beliefs about their personal responsibilities on work engagement, in a sample of 295 Italian teachers. Findings revealed a significant effect of the participants’ motivations for the choice of teaching as career on the degree of work engagement. Moreover, the teachers’ work engagement has been found to be affected by the perceived responsibility of teachers for positive outcomes (e.g. student motivation and achievement) and for students’ negative achievement and by the teachers’ career–choice satisfaction. Implications for practice will be discussed.