Teachers’ sense of responsibility and its correlates on a sample of Italian high-school teachers.

Over the past twenty years, new responsibilities have been assigned to teachers as a result of education policies based on school autonomy and decentralisation. As a consequence, increasing attention has been placed on teachers’ changing professional role, including their formal level of accountability. However, little is known about teachers’ perceived personal responsibility in the context of their broadened professional roles, its psychological determinants and correlates. The present study was designed to examine the relations between contextual and personal variables that are conceptually linked to personal perceived teachers’ responsibility, including: school climate, self-efficacy beliefs, implicit theories of intelligence, motivations for having chosen teaching as a career, perceptions about the profession, and outcomes such as career choice satisfaction, work engagement and instructional practices. Drawing on a sample of 300 teachers, structural equation modeling revealed that the sense of perceived responsibility of teachers is affected by personal and contextual variables, specifically by the teacher’s self-efficacy, increment theory of intelligence, and a perceived school positive climate concerning the relationships with students, and that the teachers’ responsibility functions as a mediator on work engagement, career choice satisfaction and mastery instructional practices. Thus, the teachers’ sense of personal responsibility should be taken into account when studying school and teachers effectiveness and planning interventions aiming at improving teachers work conditions.