Distance Education and Teachers’ Job Satisfaction during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Work-Family Conflict

Conventional school education mandatorily switched to distance education to sustain education and protect the health of students and teachers during the COVID-19 lockdown around the world. However, mandatory distance education, a sort of home-based telework, is highly likely to get more blurred the borders devoted to working and family domains and trigger the work-family conflicts experienced by teachers and reduce their job satisfaction. Although previous studies addressed the relationships between distance education and job satisfaction, there is a limited study on the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on the relationship between these three variables. The current study aims to explore the mediating role of work-family conflict in the association between distance education and teachers’ job satisfaction by using data collected from Turkish teachers working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results found that although mandatory distance education increased their job satisfaction since it allows them to maintain teaching activities under the COVID-19 circumstances, work-family conflict negatively mediated the link between mandatory distance education and teachers’ job satisfaction.