The Relationship between Effort-Reward Imbalance and Work Engagement of Physical Education Teachers in Lorestan Province

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between effort- reward imbalance and work engagement among the physical education teachers in Lorestan province.
The research methodology was descriptive-correlative and the population included physical education teachers in Lorestan province. According to the Morgan’s table (1970), the 186 teachers (102 men, 84 women) were selected as the sample. The instruments were the demographics, Schaufeli & Bakker’s work engagement questionnaire and Siegrist’s effort-reward imbalance (ERI) questionnaire. The face and content validity of the questionnaires were evaluated based on professor's viewpoints. To measure the reliability of the questionnaires, Cronbach's alpha was used. To this end, the 25 questionnaires were distributed among the selected sample. Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the ERI questionnaire was 0.80 and for the work engagement questionnaire was 0.89.
For data analysis, the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics such as Pearson correlation and regression were used. Results showed that there is a significant relationship between the demographics and work engagement. Moreover, the effort-reward imbalance had a reverse and significant relationship with work engagement. Finally, reward-effort indices were the good explanatory for the rate of work engagement.
Overall, teachers who had high ERI experienced low rate of work engagement.