Considering only the educational aspect of complex rehabilitation, it is noted that in the last decade, a major challenge for many educational systems in Europe has been to ensure high quality education in mainstream schools, where abled and disabled pupils pursue their educational needs together [
2,
3]. Countries making efforts to strive to maximize the percentage of pupils with disabilities in mainstream schools receive significant support from the European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education [
4]. According to the Polish Ministry of Education and Sciences, in 2022, more than 70% of pupils with special educational needs in primary and secondary education attended inclusive schools and the other 30% were enrolled in special schools [
5].
This trend in the European system of education indicates the priority directions for scientific research and analyses needed to support countries in the implementation of measures within the model of high-quality education for all learners, including typical pupils and those with disabilities. In response to this need, a number of studies have been undertaken to identify various (institutional and personal) indicators of the readiness of the mainstream educational institutions to provide high quality education for all learners. This report presents the results of some of those studies that explored the correlation between the climate in an organization (school) and job satisfaction and the emotions experienced by teachers who work in that organization. It also analyses how the type of an educational institution (a mainstream or special school) moderates that correlation.
Theoretical Background
For many years, the results of studies conducted by psychologists among teachers/educators have highlighted the stress generated by this profession, the same as other professions that involve direct contacts with the client. The worst consequence of prolonged stress is occupational burnout [
6]. Aware of this regularity, researchers started to seek the determinants of the burnout syndrome. Most of them point to two groups of factors that may contribute to occupational burnout: personal variables (socio-demographic and personality characteristics) ([
7], p. 87) and institutional variables (related to work and the organization) ([
8], p. 230).
Undoubtedly, a teacher who is qualified mainly to work with a typical pupil in a mainstream school may experience a high level of stress when having to dramatically adjust their teaching and work methods to the special educational needs of a pupil [
9,
10]. The way a teacher copes with such situations largely depends on their individual resources and the resources available within the organization. In order for an educational institution to be inclusive, i.e., to offer high quality education for all learners, the teachers and the organization need to improve diversity management in order to build the human capital potential required to fulfill such tasks and meet educational challenges. Good organization/school management may minimize the negative effect of an additional burden on all the constituents of the mainstream educational environment [
11].
The concept of diversity management is usually associated with the differences between employees in an organization arising from their respective personalities, cultures, religious affiliations or socio-economic status [
12] and the possible benefits of this diversity for the effectiveness of the organization [
13,
14]. It seems a very good idea to use this concept in analyses of the specificity of inclusive educational institutions, where human capital comprises not only the diversity of personnel but also the diversity of pupils (abled/disabled) and of the significant others (parents of abled/disabled pupils). The results of existing analyses clearly suggest that such diversity may be beneficial for an organization/school [
13] as well as for every individual that comprises its human capital [
15,
16,
17,
18].
The tradition of analyzing an educational institution as an organization is long-established [
19,
20,
21]. There exist a number of studies that focus on analyzing the climate of an organization (school) [
22,
23,
24,
25]. In their historical review, Zullig et al. ([
26], p. 140) noted that although school climate was for the first time mentioned in the early 20th century, scientific research started only 50 years later. Since then, numerous researchers have on the one hand highlighted the determinants of organization/school climate and on the other hand explained a number of phenomena in the contemporary school by positive/negative evaluation of that climate, especially phenomena involving the teachers [
9,
27,
28,
29,
30,
31], pupils [
25,
32,
33,
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39] and parents [
40,
41]. The importance of organizational climate for the effectiveness of an inclusive educational institution is also noted increasingly often [
42,
43,
44].
As already mentioned, the organizational/school climate is a theoretical construct used to analyze the quality of functioning of an educational institution as an organization. Based on the knowledge of the organizational climate [
45,
46], various researchers seek to translate the concept and measurement methodologies into descriptions of school or classroom climate [
19,
22,
24,
25,
26]. In the literature on the subject, we can find a whole range of theoretical deliberations whose authors review the theoretical concepts of measuring organizational climate. The overall conclusion of those reviews is that the existing concepts may be grouped on the basis of the criterion of: objective evaluation of indicators/subjective evaluation of organizational/school climate by employees, pupils, and parents [
46]. One of the most frequently used concepts of organizational climate as a subjective category is that developed by [
45], according to which the organizational climate incorporates a set of measurable properties of a working environment as they are directly or indirectly perceived by the individuals who live and work in that environment, which affects their motivation and behavior. The multiplicity of concepts translates into a multiplicity of tools for studying the organizational climate. The research reported in this paper uses a tool that is consistent with Litwin and Stringer’s concept, incorporating the OCE methodology and adapted to the Polish context by Wudarzewski ([
47], pp. 347–353). The tool describes six determinants of organizational climate: flexibility; accountability; work standards; rewards; clarity (comprehensibility) of the mission and procedures; and team engagement.
Even though, from the perspective of the organization’s inherent occupational factors affecting the level of teacher/educator’s stress, the most comprehensive approach is an analysis of subjective perception of the organizational climate, the most comprehensive approach from the perspective of personal determinants seems to be the measurement of job satisfaction and emotions accompanying work [
48].
Generally speaking, job contentment is an attitude. It means either the inner state or the individual’s impression of how good or bad the work they do is for them. Currently, job satisfaction measurements and analyses focus on two corresponding components: its emotional and cognitive aspects. What we refer to as job satisfaction constitutes the cognitive aspects of being content with one’s work. Emotional aspects are the emotional evaluation of work, one’s mood or frame of mind at work [
49]). This understanding of job satisfaction is consistent with the Transactional Model of Subjective Well-being proposed by Zalewska [
50], which treats job satisfaction as a category of overall life satisfaction. This model emphasizes the distinctiveness of the respective emotional and cognitive evaluation and assumes that the qualities (resources) of a person modify the significance of inner and outer factors as well as the processing of emotional and cognitive information ([
51], p. 2).
Job satisfaction, which is believed to be a predictor of job performance [
52], is increasingly used to assess job satisfaction among teachers/educators in mainstream schools [
28,
30,
53,
54] and special schools [
55]. In some studies, the links between organizational climate and teacher job satisfaction [
31,
48,
56] and pupil satisfaction are also examined [
39].
Based on a literature review, Mielniczuk and Łaguna ([
57] p. 2) have observed that “an opinion had long prevailed that emotions and rational thinking and acting are mutually exclusive. That is why researchers did not see emotions as an important factor potentially related to job performance. Nowadays, however, the interest in affect in the organizational context is increasing as evidence grows that emotional reactions are connected with rational decision-making, health, and different work outcomes”. Accordingly, new research reports are published that explain the share of emotions in job performance and describe the effects they bring about [
58,
59,
60,
61,
62].
Of the many concepts and methodologies for measuring work affect, the most frequently used is the job-related affective well-being measure designed by Warr to assess four types of work affect: anxiety, comfort, depression, and enthusiasm [
63]. The tool for describing emotions experienced in the workplace has been extensively modified by an international team led by Laguna [
57,
64,
65,
66]. The results of their work prove that the model used in the studies discussed herein, namely the model with four correlated factors, representing anxiety, comfort, depression, and enthusiasm, had a superior fit compared to alternative models and that mean scores on the scales of the instrument can be meaningfully compared across genders, but not across countries.
Summing up, it should be emphasized that every educational establishment providing high-quality education for all students should organize its activities around the current state of knowledge of diversity management. Diversity is found among the pupils (some have disabilities, others do not), the teachers (general education/special needs education teachers), and the parents (of typical pupils and those with disabilities), who altogether constitute the educational environment. From the organization theory perspective, a mainstream educational establishment is markedly different from a special school where such a wide diversity of stakeholders is not observed and which does not require the knowledge of diversity management [
9,
10]. Given that, this research adopted the type of an educational establishment (a mainstream school or special school) as the potential moderator of the correlation between an organizational climate and teachers’ job satisfaction and work affect
The following research question was asked: To what extend does the type of an educational institution (mainstream or special school) serve as a moderator for the correlation between subjective evaluation of organizational climate and teacher job satisfaction and emotions their work triggers in teachers? Based on the state of knowledge, the following hypotheses were also made:
Hypothesis 1 (H1). The type of an educational institution statistically significantly differentiates the analyzed variables (organizational climate, job satisfaction, work affect).
Hypothesis 2 (H2). The organizational climate has a positive, statistically significant correlation with job satisfaction and positive work affect, and a negative correlation with negative work affect.
Hypothesis 3 (H3). Organizational climate is a strong predictor of job satisfaction and work affect.
Hypothesis 4 (H4). The type of an educational institution is a moderator of the correlation between organizational climate and life satisfaction and work affect.