Rethinking Our Assumptions About Teachers' Job Satisfaction in China and the West‪.‬

Introduction Job satisfaction is very important to performance. People happy with their work are more motivated, put in more effort and are likely to perform better than those who are not. Those unhappy in their work situations may make inadequate effort, and perform poorly (Bluedorn, 1982; Herzberg, Mauser & Snyder, 1959; Ingersoll, 2001; Mueller & Price, 1990). In the case of professionals, such as teachers who work under little supervision and enjoy autonomy in carrying out their work, the effect of job satisfaction on performance can be even more pronounced (Serow et al., 1992; Duffy, 2006). Dissatisfaction with a job can prompt employees to change careers, thus wasting the collective and individual investment in their training. Turnover rates in the teaching profession are high (Guarino et al., 2006; Ingersoll, 2001). In England, the teacher attrition rate was about 7 per cent in 2004 (Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2006). In the same year about 8 per cent of the public schoolteachers and almost 14 per cent of the private schoolteachers in the USA left teaching (Marvel et al., 2007). It is difficult to obtain data from China; but in 1992 the Ministry of Education in China reported losing 450 000 or 6.4 per cent of its 7 million teachers (Chen, 1998). In the current economic downturn, such losses impose an additional reduction on already inadequate educational funding, so it is important to understand what is satisfying to teachers to abate attrition and to improve the performance of the existing teaching staff.