The COVID-19 epidemic in the early 2020s is making a big difference for educators around the world. For the past 2 years, the curriculum and working patterns have been overturned in response to this epidemic, which has brought unprecedented challenges and physical and mental stress to preschool teachers. This situation can have a drastic impact on the acquisition of job well-being for preschool teachers. During this special time, the leader’s management style will also influence the psychological feelings of the organization’s (...) staff. For example, empowering leadership is an important management function that empowers subordinates, emphasizes the meaning of work, promotes participation in decision-making, and expresses confidence. Therefore, in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, it is worthwhile to explore the topic of empowering leadership to ensure preschool teachers’ well-being, by balancing work demands and work resources in a way that facilitates a sense of organizational support and reduces job stress, while relatively fewer studies have been conducted on the relationship between preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this, this study proposed a research model from the theoretical perspective of the Job Demands-Resources Model to explore the influence of empowering leadership, sense of organizational support, and job stress on preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the purpose of this study, a convenience sampling method was used to invite 500 preschool teachers in China to complete a questionnaire survey, and after removing invalid samples and data with incomplete answers, reliability and validity analyses and model fit tests were conducted, followed by a structural equation modeling method for path analysis. The results of the study showed that in the kindergarten work context, empowering leadership showed a significant negative effect on job stress, but a significant positive effect on job well-being and a significant positive effect on sense of organizational support. Sense of organizational support had a significant negative effect on job stress but a significant positive effect on preschool teachers’ job well-being. Preschool teachers’ job stress and job well-being showed a significant negative effect. The contribution of this study was to explore the relationship between understanding leadership empowerment and preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, which will facilitate educational organizational contexts to empower preschool teachers to work harder to reduce their job stress as well as enhance their sense of organizational support and promote the acquisition of job well-being. (shrink)

This study aims to explore the relationship and mechanism between the preschool inclusive education teachers’ organizational support, teacher self-efficacy, and work engagement. This study adopted the organizational support scale, inclusive education efficacy scale, and work engagement scale, measured for 600 preschool inclusive education teachers, eventually obtained 568 effective questionnaires, established research model, and analyzed the data using the structural equation model. There are significantly more men than women, and the majority were public kindergarten. Organizational support significantly positively affects teachers’ self-efficacy (...) and work engagement in preschool inclusive education. Preschool teachers’ self-efficacy has a significant positive impact on work engagement. Preschool teachers’ self-efficacy plays a partial mediating role between organizational support and work engagement. Organizational support not only directly affects teachers’ self-efficacy and work engagement in preschool inclusive education but also indirectly affects their work engagement through preschool teachers’ self-efficacy, which provides theoretical and practical guidance for the research of inclusive education. (shrink)