Burnout and Job Satisfaction Among Islamic Religious Knowledge Teachers in Brunei Darussalam

This study aimed to identify the level of burnout (emotional desolation, depersonalization


Introduction
Burnout is becoming rampant among teachers around the world that at least one third of the teachers is suffering under extreme stress and/or burnout (Balzer et al., 1995). Each job has its own pressures due to a variety of problems that may be encountered within the workplace. However, researches have shown that teachers' burnout has an adverse impact on their efficiency and productivity (see for review: Betoret, 2006;Brouwers & Tomic, 2000;Chan & Hui, 1995;Chwalisz et al., 1992;Evers et al., 2002;Greenberg & Baron, 1997;Schwarzer & Hallum, 2008;and Smith et al., 1969). According to Greenberg and Baron (1997), burnout can lead to lack of the power of emotions (emotional exhaustion), lack of physical efforts (physical exhaustion), drop of the attitude (attitudinal exhaustion) and loss of feelings about the achievement in a career (low feelings of accomplishment). This idea is fully supported by Travers (2017) who also emphasized the effects of burnout can lead to emotionally exhausted.

Burnout and Job Satisfaction Among Islamic Religious Knowledge Teachers in Brunei Darussalam
Early this year (January 2016), teachers in Brunei Darussalam cried out for a reexamination of their workloads which they see as being strenuous, overburdening and disturbing (Dick & Wagner, 2001). Even though the quality of teachers in the education system whatever determines the level of educational goals (Yusuf, 2022). While the adverse effects of teacher's burn out or teacher excessive workloads abound in the literature, the extent to which teachers in Brunei Darussalam have been overloaded is still unclear and, more importantly, there is a dearth of study that investigates the coping technique that these teachers might adopt.
The main purpose of this study, therefore, was to identify the level of burnout (emotional desolation, depersonalization and personal accomplishment) and job satisfaction (job type, salary, promotion opportunities, supervisory and colleagues) among teachers of religious education in Brunei Darussalam (referred to as IRK teachers in this study). The significance of the study lies in the fact that it would shed more lights on how an informed policy could be made to tackle the problem raised by teachers in Brunei Darussalam. Burnout is operationalized in this study as a concept that refers to the accumulated effects and a symptom of emotional depletion and loss of motivation and commitment that result from long-term human services workers (Brouwers & Tomic, 2000;Chang, 2009;Jennet et al, 2003;Sünbül, 2003). By this definition, every profession that involves human beings, such as the teaching profession, cannot escape the problems of stress/strain or burnout. According to Maslach (1976), and paraphrased by Chang (2009), "the burnout phenomenon commonly exists in the caregiving and service occupations, in which the emotions, motives, and values between provider and recipient are the underlying interpersonal context for burnout". However, the adverse effects of teacher burnout are far-reaching and more dangerous. According to Chang (2009), citing from various sources (e.g. Milner & Woolfolk, 2003;Macdonald, 1999;U.S Department of Education, 2004;No Dream Denied, 2003;and Smith et al, 1969), "25% of beginning teachers leave the teaching field before their third year, and almost 40% leave the profession within the first 5 years of teaching. In Germany, fewer than 10% of the teachers remain until retirement and in Britain, the number of teachers who leave the profession is also more than the number of teachers who stay until retirement". From all these studies, it was proven that burnout among teachers did have negative effects on the intention of the teachers to stay in their profession longer before their retirement age.
Studies in different cultures show that measures of teacher burnout predict both subjective and objective health as well as teachers' motivation and job satisfaction (Cockburn & Haydn, 2004). Generally, job satisfaction can be defined as 'employees' feelings of attainment and accomplishment at work'. Individual's level of job satisfaction can range from extraordinary satisfaction to outrageous disappointment. In addition, it has been shown that "both emotional exhaustion and depersonalization correlated negatively with self-rated health as well as workability and that the exhaustion dimension of burnout predicted teachers' intentions of leaving the profession, and there is a negative correlation between burnout and motivation" (Hakanen et al, 2006;Oteer, 2015;and Schauveli & Salanova, 2007). Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2007), in their study, attempted "to test the factor structure of a recently developed Norwegian scale for measuring teacher self-efficacy and partly to explore relations between teachers' perception of the school context, teacher self-efficacy, collective teacher efficacy, teacher burnout, teacher job satisfaction, and teachers' beliefs. Results show that teacher self-efficacy, collective efficacy and two dimensions of burnout were differently related both to school context variables and to teacher job satisfaction". From here, it can be seen that there were external factors such as school environment as well as internal factors such as teachers' beliefs which could contribute to the productivity, psychological aspects, and work performance of teachers. Be that as it may, all these factors are very crucial to look into and to be assessed from time to time.
Moreover, Klassen and Chiu (2010) did a study which involved almost similar variables as Skaalvik and Skaalvik (2007) where they investigated "the correlations among teachers' years of experience, teacher characteristics (gender and teaching level), three domains of self-efficacy (instructional strategies, classroom management, and student engagement), two types of job stress (workload and classroom stress), and job satisfaction". The study used item response modeling, systems of equations, and a structural equation model. Results showed that teachers with higher workload stress had greater classroom management and higher selfefficacy, whereas teachers with greater classroom stress had lower self-efficacy and lower job satisfaction. This study supported research done by Oteer (2015) where individuals who are in the educational arena are often exposed to situations that go beyond their responsibilities. In other words, teachers who are able to cope stress outside the scope of their profession (as teachers) may be able to show good control in their classroom and this sort of teachers would have higher level of self-efficacy.
As for coping strategy, there are two main approaches by which teachers could control and regulate emotions at a personal level: reappraisal and suppression. Reappraisal approach is when a teacher changes his or her thinking about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. As for the suppression approach, teacher reduces unpleasant emotional experiences and expressions while increasing positive emotional experiences and expressions. This approach does less in preventing burnout and it also "consumes cognitive resources, impairing memory for information presented during the emotion regulation period" (Gross, 2002).
In Brunei Darussalam, the first wave of pandemic Covid-19 happened in March 2020 and Brunei has taken a 'whole of government' approach. The Brunei's Ministry of Health had quickly adopted World Health Organization regulations, including social distancing and self-isolation, as well as contact tracing. Not only that, the government enforced procedures with fines and jail terms. As a result, the pandemic was under control. In August 2021, the second wave outbreak of Covid-19 happened where new positive cases of Covid-19 were found and once again, the government was very proactive in enforcing the regulations by which to contain the pandemic. Government officers and all students are urged to work from home and are advised to limit their mobility to any premises. Due to these restrictions, undoubtedly public do become stressful as well as burnout and has led to a significant and unprecedented worsening of population mental health. The disruption of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed us and therefore educational transformation is needed (Ratih, et al., 2021).
A cross-sectional study was done in relation to impact of Covid-19 pandemic on students and academics in Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Idris et al, 2020). This study involved 56 academics and 279 university students. Results showed that negative experiences in relation to health, both students and academics reported that they experienced stress, anxiety, loneliness, back problems and eye strain. These are likely to be exacerbated with prolonged screen time (Shahrill et al, 2021;Idris et al, 2020) A study done by Yahya (2021) involving the caretakers of stroke patients in Brunei Darussalam found that during the time of pandemic Covid0-19, the caretakers experienced psychological issues such as anxiety, stress, lack of sleep and depression. In this study, the caretakers were the immediate family of the stroke patients such as their spouse and children and have been taking care the patients more than three years. The psychological issues that they were facing were cause by long hours staying at home (due to  and have to work long hours taking care of stroke patients. In short, regardless what profession an individual is holding, during the time of pandemic COVID-19, the level of burnout experienced by an individual prone to increase.

Method
This is a descriptive study in which researchers involved all teachers of Islamic Religious Knowledge (IRK) teaching in the high school in Brunei Darussalam as the sample. They are 238 people. In this study, the researchers used a questionnaire survey as a research instrument. There are 2 types of research instruments used; Job Descriptive Index (JDI) as an instrument that measures the level of job satisfaction of teachers. This instrument has been designed by Smith, Kendall & Hulin (1976) and has been improved by another researcher (Balzer et al, 1995). This instrument contains 72 items that were divided into five factors: job satisfaction, salary, promotion, supervisor & supervision and colleagues.
The second instrument is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). It was used to identify the frequency by which respondent experiences burnout. This instrument comprises three aspects: emotional desolation, personal accomplishment, and depersonalization (loss of individual attributes of concern for other people who receive care, treatment and services thereof). MBI consists of 47 items in total to be responded to on a Likert scale of 0-7. Table 1 below shows the guide for the analysis of results.  Table 2 below presents the results of IRK teachers' responses on the level of burnouts with respect to emotional desolation. Overall, in this aspect, the teachers have a moderate level of burnout where the minutes range from 2.73 -3.25 on items such as ' feeling emotionally drained from work' (the minutes = 2.70), 'feeling strong to work' (minutes value = 3:24) and 'feeling run out of energy after work' (value = 3:25 minutes). These results show that teachers are able to control their emotions even after a hard day's work.  Table 3, the result of the burnout level of the IRK teachers in the aspect of depersonalization is presented. Result reveals that the majority of teachers care about the feelings of others (62.2%) and are concerned with what is happening to their students (58.4%). The result also shows that majority of teachers do not feel that students are blaming them for their peculiar problems (60.9%). Overall, the burnout level of the teachers in this aspect is low, as it is evidenced in the minutes which range from 0.76 to 1.10 (low level). It can be concluded that the teachers still have the time to concern about other benefits like their student even though they are busy with their professional work.

c. The aspect of Personal Achievement
In the aspect of personal achievement, the resulting data showed that the level of teacher burnout is moderate (see Table 4). However, there are some cases where the failure is controlled which can cause the teachers to encounter a high level of burnout, such as 'feeling happy after a struggle to treat the students' had a minimum of value = 4.57 and 'feeling successful to have achieved many things in this career with a minimum value = 4.68 which both of these minute values are close to high minute value (minute = 4.8 above). In other words, if a teacher is too strained in serving others and wished to achieve many things in his/her career, he/she would suffer a high level of burnout if what he/she wished for is not achieved and eventually feel the frustration of personal achievement. Thus, the teacher should be wise in arranging the time for self, career and time for others. All educators have the responsibility for creating a positive learning environment that provides learners with sufficient opportunities to practice, using the new knowledge and skills that they have gain (Thambu, et al., 2021). Level of job satisfaction was measured using a descriptive job survey index (JDI). This instrument has been widely used in many countries including Malaysia and it has a high validity value. This instrument measures four aspects of job satisfaction: the type of job, career promotion opportunities, supervisors, and the type of supervision and colleagues. The result of data analysis as presented in Table 5 shows that in terms of employment, the IRK teachers have a moderate level of job satisfaction since the mean value is between 1.02 and 1.47 (on the continuous medium). Furthermore, the table also shows that over 90% of the teachers stated that the teaching profession is good (93.7%), worthwhile (98.3%), challenging (95.4%) and they are always ready to work (94.5%). Meanwhile, from another perspectives, 48.3% of teachers stated that the teaching profession is exhausting for having no time limit and 57.6% believes it is inexhaustible job. Table 6 below gives the impression that the IRK teachers have a high level of job satisfaction in terms of promotion opportunities. This can be seen from the percentage who agreed that the job of a teacher has a good chance of promotion (56.7%), good prospect for the future (66.0%), good hope for promotion (58.4%) and promotional opportunities depending on the ability of individuals (51.7%). This perception may result from the teaching schemes which were introduced in Brunei Darussalam to provide more opportunities for teachers to upgrade themselves.

f. Level of Job Satisfaction Among IRK Teachers: Supervisor and Supervisory
In terms of supervisor and supervision system (S&SY) which provides teachers with practical skills which has been practical for teachers, result shows that teachers have a moderate level of job satisfaction. However, if this aspect is taken lightly, their job satisfaction may be low. It was found that 81.5% of teachers agreed that their supervi-sors are likely to give credit to a job well done, 81.1% stated they have a supervisor who loves to work with care, 80.7% indicated that their supervisors know how to asses good work, 77.3% recognized that their supervisors are smart and 76.5% identified that their supervisors and supervision are up to date.  Table 8 below shows that the level of job satisfaction by IRK teachers from the aspect of the colleague is high. This is evidenced in that over 80% of teachers stated that their colleagues were the ones who always gave them support, their colleagues were smart (99.1%), neat (92.9%), responsible (92%), efficient towards the work that has been given to them (84.5%) and active persons (83.2%).  Table 9 presents the total and summary of level of job satisfaction in all the aspects. From Table 9, the score from total dimension of work satisfactory are divided into three levels: the highest-level scores between 181-270 which implies that respondents have high level of work satisfac-tion, while the score of 91-180 shows that respondents have medium level ofwork satisfaction; the score between 0-90 illustrates respondents having low level of work satisfaction. Based on this, it is evidenced that majority of teachers have a medium level of job satisfaction whereas the remaining 38.7% of teachers show a low level of job satisfaction. According to Faridah and Zubaidah (1998), teaching itself is deemed to be a work that is often exposed to high levels of tension and stress in relation with the work. It has been reported more than half of the various pressures included are faced by the teacher. Generally, stress is necessary to stimulate the work or daily activity (Songan & Narawi, 2002;Lambert et al, 2018). However, excessive stress can cause a variety of negative impacts that can affect the performance and work satisfaction (Schaufeli & Salanova, 2007). Kyriacou & Sutcliffe (1978) also emphasized that prolonged stress can weaken the mental and physical health of the teacher as well as weaken the teaching profession and the performance of students significantly because the stress can affect the quality of teaching and the teacher's commitment.

h. Overall level of job satisfaction of IRK teachers
Excessive or prolonged stress can negatively impact the psychological aspects, physiology and behavior of the teacher (Dunham, 1992). From the aspect of psychology, there are teachers that can easily get displeased, offended, emotionally disturbed, lose passion or self-motivation. Whereas, in physiological aspects, a teacher that faces constant pressure without finding suitable release can easily experience high blood pressure, kidney failure, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and other chronicle diseases. In terms of behavior, teachers that tend to avoid from attending gatherings or meetings, hypermobility, distance themselves from the public, disengage, and so forth. In this context, Selye (1976) has listed 31 stress symptoms that can be divided into physical and behavioral symptoms. This matter is very apprehensive as teachers' mental and physical health evidently do play important roles in their teaching and learning process (Suradi, 2001;Macdonald, 1999). In carrying out every job there must be someone who doesn't like it, therefore it takes strength to motivate yourself (Prayitno, et al., 2019).
Stress that arises by excessive workload, if it is not given serious concern, physical and behavior symptom can be increased (McGrath, 1995). If those symptoms are frequently being neglected, as a result, burnout will occur. In the consequence, teachers will try to protect themselves by self-withdrawal such as absence, frequently being absent from work, loss of commitment, no satisfaction in work, interpersonal conflict, leaving the teaching profession and early retirement (Faridah & Zubaidah, 1998;Dunham, 1992). Specifically in this research, the data result shows that the level of burnout is at the medium level, from emotionally aspect and how they see their personal achievement with a low level of burnout or depersonalization. Overall, as a result of this research, it gives the impression that IRK teachers are still able to control their feelings.
A teacher, as a profession that is praised by the community and employs high expectations from the country, attempt to complete the task that has been entrusted to him, by providing the best service in terms of excellence in teaching and learning for our nation. In this effort, they are exposed to a variety of challenging risks and difficulties for himself as a teacher. Hence, stress that is experienced by the teacher is an issue that we should give serious attention to because burnout or avoidance in contributing to the educational process of his students will result in significant negativity towards academic growth and welfare for our youngsters. Another crucial focus that needs attention is the role of social support whereby research have shown that the more social support (both inside and outside of school) is given, teachers will experience less burnout meanwhile, when the teachers show high satisfaction, their level of burnout will also decrease (Fiorilli et al., 2017).
It is not a secret that teacher also plays a role as a counselor, although the institution has a counselor. It can be caused by the relationship of mutual respect and trust established by the teacher build the tendency of students to disclose and discuss their personal problems with the entrusted teacher (Singh & Nisha, 2020). Students seek advice, suggestion, and even life spoilers from the teacher as an adult whom they trust. Aligning with the complexity of youth mental challenges due to the significant mental health awareness arising of the youth in this era, the teachers, especially regular classroom teachers, are found in a study (Roeser & Midgley, 1997) that more than half of them reported feeling exhausted by the mental health needs of their students. It can be implicitly predicted from the study that the future challenges with complex mental challenges of the students will affect the mental health of the teacher globally and Brunei is no exception. In dealing with these challenges, teachers are needed to be equipped with sufficient tools, knowledge, and referral equipment to help students with mental health issues in this era. It is strongly encouraged to conduct mental health-based training and program for academia as the first aider to simultaneously help the student's and teacher's mental health issues.

Conclusion
Covid-19 has brought numerous changes in the area of education, for instance. The teaching and learning process happen online and has become mandatory, Brunei Darussalam is no exception.
Previous studies have shown that job satisfaction is highly related to teacher's performance. According to Cockburn and Haydn, teachers derive satisfaction from the nature of their day-to-day school activities especially from their interactions with students and colleagues. This may suggest, albeit inconclusively, that the level of burnout among teachers can be lowered by providing an enabling and friendly environment and improving school general climate.
In this study, it is clear that IRK teachers' burnout in Brunei Darussalam can be ameliorated by institutionalizing programs that would strengthen cordial relationships among teachers and the administrators and by improving school general climate. In conclusion, we suggest further studies and investigation on burnout levels among teachers of various subjects other than IRK in Brunei Darussalam.