Development and psychometric study to the Scale of Organizational Sources of Stress on Teaching in Higher Education

Abstract

Working environments given the great instability and turbulence of modern times, have become more demanding and stressful for most workers. Specifically in higher education teaching context this phenomenon is alarmingly increasing (Winefield, 2000). For this reason, we consider important to acknowledge the potential sources of stress in specific working contexts, given the role that this knowledge might have on the assumption of preventive primary and secondary intervention measures on occupational stress, which are themselves the most efficient ones (Lamontagne, Keegel, Louie, Ostry, & Landsbergis, 2007).The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument and carry out a preliminary psychometric study to the Scale of Organizational Sources of Stress on Teaching in Higher Education. We based the development of the scale on literature review and on the results of content analysis of individual interviews to higher education academics. Initially composed by 28 items, the scale was applied to 236 academics of public and private higher education organizations (university and polytechnic) in Oporto. After the exploratory factor analysis and the internal consistency analysis of the factors extracted, which collectively explain 55,4% of total variance, the scale was composed by 20 items grouped into four factors: characteristics of the job (α = .87), organizational climate (α = .85), career development (α = .78) and working conditions (α = .74). The final factors structure reveals a discriminating power between the factors, which leads us to believe that the scale is able to differentiate the various sources of stress in this type of work contexts. Studies to validate the scale nationwide are now a priority.