How appreciation predicts teachers' job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and quitting intentions

Teacher appreciation has been promoted as a strategy to combat teacher shortages, under the assumption that public recognition boosts job satisfaction and retention. However, empirical support for this claim has been sparse, particularly regarding how sources of appreciation influence teachers. This study adopted an ecological framework to investigate how various sources of appreciation relate to teachers' job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion, and quitting intentions. Analyses of survey data from 1,069 German schoolteachers were performed to examine the impact of appreciations from students, mentees, and colleagues (microsystem); school leaders and parents (mesosystem); administrators and policymakers (exosystem); and society (macrosystem). The findings reveal that appreciation is significantly linked to teacher well-being, positively predicting job satisfaction while negatively predicting emotional exhaustion and quitting intentions. Appreciations from the microsystem and mesosystem had notably stronger direct impacts than those from the exosystem and macrosystem, which showed indirect effects.