Work-family balance fuels teaching engagement through identity and self-efficacy

University teachers around the world are working under a kind of pressure that their predecessors could scarcely have imagined. The tenure-track system, now widespread across research universities, ties career survival to a relentless stream of publications, grants and performance metrics. Against that backdrop, a new study published in BMC Psychology offers a strikingly concrete answer to a question that has quietly troubled higher education for years: what actually keeps teachers engaged in the classroom when the system seems designed to pull them away from it? The answer, according to a research team at the Institute of Higher Education at Anhui University in Hefei, China, begins somewhere unexpected — at home.

The study, led by Xiaoli Ye and colleagues, investigated how work-family balance relates to teaching engagement among university teachers, and, crucially, how that relationship works psychologically. The team surveyed 928 university teachers and then sat down for in-depth interviews with 20 of them, using an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design that allowed the numbers to point the way and the interviews to explain what the numbers meant. The findings reveal a two-step psychological pathway: work-family balance strengthens professional identity, which in turn builds teaching self-efficacy, and together these two factors channel a teacher’s energy back into teaching. The research was grounded in conservation of resources theory and social cognitive theory, two frameworks that together explain how people acquire, protect and deploy the psychological resources needed to perform under pressure.

Conservation of resources theory, developed by psychologist Stevan Hobfoll, holds that people strive to obtain and safeguard the resources they value, and that stress arises when those resources are threatened or lost. Teaching engagement, in this view, is not simply a matter of willpower or dedication; it depends on a teacher having enough psychological resources in reserve to invest in the classroom. Work-family balance — the perception that the demands of work and the demands of family are manageable together rather than in conflict — acts as a foundational resource pool. When work and family are in balance, teachers are not constantly draining their reserves to plug leaks in one domain or the other. When they are out of balance, the constant negotiation between marking deadlines and childcare schedules consumes resources that would otherwise flow into lesson preparation, student interaction and classroom innovation.

But the study shows that having resources is not enough on its own. The quantitative analysis, using structural equation modeling, revealed a sequential mediation pathway: work-family balance was positively associated with professional identity, and professional identity was positively associated with teaching self-efficacy. The indirect effect of work-family balance on teaching engagement through these two mediators was statistically significant. In plain terms, work-family balance does not push teachers directly toward engagement; it first reshapes how they see themselves as professionals, and that strengthened identity then gives them confidence in their own teaching abilities. Only after passing through these two psychological transformations do the resources of a balanced life actually reach the classroom.

The qualitative interviews illuminated exactly how these transformations happen. Teachers described how professional identity fosters intrinsic motivation by redefining the meaning of teaching. When a teacher sees teaching not as a job to be survived but as an expression of who they are — a calling tied to their sense of self — the motivation to teach becomes internal rather than imposed. One of the most compelling insights from the interviews is that work-family balance provides foundational psychological resources that require specific transformation processes to be channeled into teaching. A teacher who feels in control of their life is more able to ask the deeper question of why they teach at all, and the answer to that question is what turns energy into engagement.

The second transformation involves teaching self-efficacy, a concept drawn from Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory. Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their own capacity to execute the behaviors required to produce desired outcomes. Teaching self-efficacy, specifically, is a teacher’s confidence in their ability to manage a classroom, explain difficult material, respond to student needs and handle the unexpected. The interviews showed that teaching self-efficacy empowers teaching innovation by enhancing perceived classroom competence. Teachers who believe they can handle the classroom are more willing to experiment — to try new pedagogical methods, redesign courses, integrate technology and take pedagogical risks. Innovation, in other words, is not a personality trait; it is a downstream product of confidence, and that confidence is itself fed by the stability of a balanced life.

The implications of this two-step pathway reach well beyond the psychology of individual teachers. The widespread implementation of the tenure-track system has imposed intense performance pressure on university teachers, raising general concerns about their teaching engagement. Institutions that want to improve teaching quality have traditionally focused on the classroom itself — training programs, teaching evaluations, curriculum reform. This study suggests that some of the most powerful levers for teaching engagement lie outside the classroom, in the daily negotiation between work and family. A university that helps teachers manage the boundaries between their professional and personal lives is, according to these findings, indirectly investing in the quality of its own teaching.

The practical recommendations that flow from the research are concrete. University administrators could strengthen teaching support by designing policies that acknowledge the reality of teachers’ family lives — flexible scheduling, reasonable workload distribution, family-friendly benefits and institutional cultures that do not penalize teachers for having lives outside the university. The study also points to the value of interventions that target the two mediators directly: programs that help teachers reconnect with the meaning of their professional identity, and mentoring or mastery experiences that build genuine confidence in teaching skills. Because the pathway is sequential, strengthening professional identity should also raise teaching self-efficacy, creating a compounding effect on engagement.

Methodologically, the study is notable for the way it combines breadth and depth. The survey of 928 teachers provided the statistical power to test the mediation model, while the semi-structured interviews with 20 teachers provided the explanatory texture that quantitative data alone cannot supply. This explanatory sequential design — numbers first, interviews second — is increasingly recognized as a gold standard for research questions that involve both magnitude and mechanism. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Ethics Committee of Anhui University, and it received funding from the Youth Project on Education supported by the National Social Science Fund of China, examining factors and mechanisms of teaching engagement among young faculty in research universities under the up-or-out system.

What makes the findings resonate so widely is how universal the underlying tension is. Teachers everywhere — from research universities in China to community colleges in the United States — face the same collision between institutional demands and personal responsibilities. The study does not claim that work-family balance is a magic solution to every problem in higher education. It claims something more precise and more actionable: that a balanced life provides the raw material, that professional identity refines that material into motivation, and that teaching self-efficacy converts motivation into confident, innovative classroom practice. For a profession under strain, that chain of transformation may be the most hopeful news in years — a reminder that the path to better teaching may begin not with another evaluation form, but with a teacher who has the time, the identity and the confidence to walk into a classroom and give it everything they have.

Subject of Research: How work-family balance facilitates teaching engagement among university teachers: A mixed-methods approach

Article Title: How work-family balance facilitates teaching engagement among university teachers: A mixed-methods approach

Article References: Ye, X., Yang, W., Cheng, T., Dong, Y., & Zhang, Y. (2026). How work-family balance facilitates teaching engagement among university teachers: A mixed-methods approach. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05628-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05628-6

Keywords: work-family, balance, facilitates, teaching, engagement, university, teachers, mixed-methods, approach, scientific research