Angelini and colleagues employed a cross-sectional survey design combined with path analysis to examine how three teacher character virtues—caring, inquisitiveness, and self-control—influence teachers’ work engagement and overall well-being, and to further test the mediating roles of burnout and teacher self-efficacy. The study involved 339 in-service teachers in Italy from both primary and secondary education, and collected data on character virtues, burnout, self-efficacy, work engagement, and psychological well-being to examine both direct and indirect relationships among these variables.
The results showed that the three character virtues exerted significant overall positive effects on teachers’ engagement and well-being. Correlational analyses indicated that inquisitiveness, caring, and self-control were all positively associated with self-efficacy, work engagement, and well-being, and negatively associated with burnout. Path analysis further revealed that inquisitiveness and self-control significantly reduced burnout (β = –.142, p < .05; β = –.235, p < .001, respectively) and enhanced teacher self-efficacy (β = .206, p < .01; β = .191, p < .01). Caring, by contrast, mainly influenced outcomes through increasing self-efficacy (β = .171, p < .01) and did not directly reduce burnout. Burnout had strong negative effects on work engagement (β = –.528, p < .001) and well-being (β = –.324, p < .001), whereas self-efficacy significantly increased engagement (β = .212, p < .001) and well-being (β = .219, p < .001), highlighting their central mediating roles in the model. Overall, the model explained 35.6% of the variance in work engagement and 45.7% of the variance in well-being.
Notably, the mechanisms through which different character virtues operated were not identical. Inquisitiveness had direct effects on both work engagement (β = .095, p < .05) and well-being (β = .122, p < .05), as well as significant indirect effects through burnout and self-efficacy. Caring primarily affected well-being (β = .184, p < .001), with its influence on work engagement largely mediated by self-efficacy. Self-control did not directly predict engagement or well-being, but indirectly promoted both outcomes by reducing burnout and enhancing self-efficacy. These findings suggest that teacher character virtues influence professional functioning through multiple psychological and occupational pathways rather than a single uniform mechanism.
Overall, this study demonstrates that teachers’ character virtues constitute important personal resources for fostering professional engagement and psychological well-being, with burnout and self-efficacy serving as key mechanisms linking character to well-being. The authors emphasize that teacher well-being and burnout should be viewed as two ends of the same continuum, and recommend that future teacher support and professional development programs incorporate character-based interventions to simultaneously reduce burnout risk and enhance teachers’ professional vitality and overall well-being.
Source (Open Access): Angelini, G., Mamprin, C., Buonomo, I., Benevene, P., & Fiorilli, C. (2026). Virtues, engagement, and well-being in teachers: Associations with burnout and self-efficacy in a path analysis model. Teaching and Teacher Education, 169, 105284.