부산대학교 도서관

Personality characteristics of infant teachers are very important because infant teachers are the ones who teach infants in school and specifically influence their learning process. Therefore, the effects of personality on ego-resilience and work-related stress are presupposed to be different according to personality of each infant teacher, and this study intended to investigate if 5 personality factors are really related to and work as a mediating variable on a relationship between ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teacher. The ego resilience mentioned in the topic signifies the ability of recovering stress and anxiety into the equilibrium state by handling stress and anxiety under unpredictable difficult situations dynamically and successfully and handling them gently. Work-related stress signifies a mental state that can cause psychological maladjustment and lead to mental or physical imbalance as it gives negative effect on psychological adjustment or job performance of individual teacher. Personality factor is composed of 5 representative factors as neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.There are still many different views on 5 factors that compose personality characteristic, but definition and interpretation of 5 factors by NEO-PI-R are being widely used among researchers. This study conducted questionnaire survey on 400 infant teachers, used data of 302 teachers excluding the ones with unreliable response for the analysis, and used ego-resilience scale index, work-related scale index, and 5 personality traits scale index. This study analyzed frequency and percentage for frequency analysis to investigate demographic characteristic, and verified credibility of subfactors using Cronbach's alpha test. Also, this study used correlation of ego-resilience, work-related stress, and 5 personality traits through Pearson’s correlation analysis, and conducted Baron & Kenny’s 3-step regression analysis to verify the mediating effect of 5 personality factors. First, according to the result of analyzing correlation between ego-resilience, work-related stress, and 5 personality factors of infant teachers, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness among 5 personality factors showed statistically significant positive correlation with interpersonal relation efficiency and showed significantly negative correlation with neuroticism and work-related stress of 5 personality factors. Also, subdomains of ego-resilience as confidence, optimistic attitude, and anger management also showed significantly negative correlation with neuroticism and work-related stress, work-related stress showed significantly negative correlation with 5 personality factors as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness as it showed significantly positive correlation with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, and showed significant correlation with neuroticism. In other words, it can be considered that there is an overall correlation between ego-resilience, work-related stress, and 5 personality traits of infant teachers Secondly, the followings are the results of investigating the mediating effect of 5 personality factors in a relationship between ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teacher. First, neuroticism is considered to have partial mediating effect because independent variable is statistically significant on dependent variables in 3 steps. Second, for extraversion, step 1 and 2 were statistically significant but it was identified that ego-resilience did not have mediating effect on stress(dependent variable).Thirdly, as shown on the table in page 41, 1 and 2 were both statistically significant for agreeableness and the role of mediating variable gets verified when it is lower in step 3 than step 2, and it can be considered to have partial mediating effect as the result value is lower than step 3 and statistically significant on independent variable and dependent variable. It was identified that conscientiousness and openness have no mediating effect because the significance probability cannot be considered to be statistically significant in step 3. This study made the following conclusions based on the result of investigating the effects of personality on ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teachers. First, it was identified that subfactors of ego-resilience of kindergarten teachers as interpersonal relationship efficiency, confidence, optimistic attitude, and anger management have significantly positive correlation with 5 personality factors as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness and significantly negative correlation with neuroticism, and it was verified that 5 personality traits model does not make significant effect on a relationship between ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teachers as work-related stress showed significantly negative correlation with extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness and significantly positive correlation with neuroticism. Secondly, this study conducted mediating effect verification using Baron & Kenny’s 3-step regression analysis to identify if 5 personality traits model works as a mediating variable in a relationship between ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teachers. Among subfactors of 5 personality traits, neuroticism and agreeableness showed partial mediating tendency on ego-resilience and work-related stress of infant teachers. This signifies that emotionally stable people have high ego-resilience and get less work-related stress, and ego-resilience is higher and work-related stress is lower when they have comfortable and harmonious relationship with others and are more caring and have tender heart. This study intends to make few suggestions for a follow-up study based on the research results. First, this study was conducted on Gyeonggi-do and Jeolla-do, so it would be necessary to raise generalizability by expanding the area nationwide and collecting more samples. Secondly, more in-depth research would have to be conducted because investigation on ego-resilience and work-related stress of teachers was done through on-site monitoring, not questionnaire survey. Thirdly, this study investigated mediating effects of 5 personality traits model on a relationship between ego-resilience and work-related stress, but systematic research on variables of various aspects of teachers and infants as teacher efficacy, exhaustion, job satisfaction, and communication is necessary.