Several studies confirm the importance of teachers’ work environment in influencing teachers’ job satisfaction, retention, attrition rate, organisational commitment and eventually engagement at work. Ambiguity at work would encompass double meaning or lack of clarity as far as the work role is concerned (Lee et al., 2009). This means that an employee will not know what his/her role requirements are and this has the potential to lead to poor quality work. This is reported to negatively affect productivity and also lead to underachievement (Furnham & Taylor, 2011), not because an employee wants to, but because what constitutes the work role is not clear. Role ambiguity and role conflict are often researched together as elements of role stress. Wright (2009) states that an employee experiences role ambiguity when it is not clear to the employee what actions and strategies such an employee should engage in to ensure that the task at hand is effectively done. Employees can be said to experience
role conflict when work related messages (i.e. how to do a specific task) are mixed and therefore unclear (Wright, 2009). It could therefore be reasoned that the special school environment is one characterised by constantly planning and strategising teaching lessons and appropriate ways to deliver. It is not just one of those work task where you come to class and use a routine that worked last week as there is a high demand for constant evaluation to ensure that learning is indeed taking place. This could imply that at some points, special needs teachers (more specifically the new incoming special needs teachers) will not have clear cut strategies on how to meet the expectations of their work role and thus not engage effectively.
Findings from empirical studies confirm the negative relationship that work ambiguity has with work engagement. Rothmann and Rothmann (2010) conducted a study on factors associated with employee engagement in South Africa. Their findings revealed that the more the work environment is not clearly defined, the more unpredictable events are, and the more inclined employees are to disengage in such work environments. This could possibly hold true for the special school environment, hence the emphasis on individualised attention as a key principle that governs special needs teachers’ work in the school environment. Similarly, Kunte and Rungruang (2019), explored the antecedents of WE and found a negative relationship between role ambiguity and WE. This was supported by Moura, Organbidez-Ramos and Goncalves (2014), who found that role ambiguity is negatively related to work engagement.
Ambiguity of work among special education teachers arise as a result of the changes that evolved in terms of what constitutes special education (Crane & Iwanicki, 1986), an increase in the lack of administrative support, as well as the pace and amount of work such teachers face. In addition Warton et al. (1992) assert that a teacher’s work is challenging to define and specify as the various activities teachers engage in vary depending on the nature of learners that a teacher has. For instance, the work structure of a class that has physically challenged learners is completely different from a class of learners having intellectual difficulties. Research by various authors explicate that the role of teachers is one of the most complex roles. It is one of the professions that, with time, have acquired differing responsibilities, adding more unclear structures that now define teacher’s roles. For instance, special needs
teachers, apart from their teaching work, have to always be prepared to offer counselling to learners affected daily by various issues found at home and school.
In a critical analysis of literature pertaining to the attrition of special needs teachers, Billingsley (2004) uncovered that the job design of teachers as far as work structure and organisation is concerned are documented as reasons why special needs teachers decide to leave their work. Special needs teachers as alluded to earlier, work with learners with various kinds of disabilities, which inevitably limits the learning process of learners. Such limitations are left with the teacher to cognitively strategise on the best possible ways to enhance the learning process of the learners. Simply put, there is no said structure that a special needs teacher follows as far as teaching is concerned. This could possibly be attributed to the fact that special needs teachers, compared to mainstream teachers, deal with learners whose abilities may vary considerably, as any form of disability has limitations that taxes on the learning ability of the learner (Landolt, 2014). A special needs teacher has to find strategies each day to aid in the learning process of such learners. More so, the teacher is also responsible for ensuring that learners in his/her class are taken care of emotionally and physically. It is a reasonable assumption that no employee will willingly stay and endure the psychological, physical and emotional effects of burnout in any workplace, especially when other opportunities for work present themselves as more favourable.
The nature of teaching at a special schools entails a number of changes to what teaching has traditionally been conceptualised, as Billingsley (2004) asserts that the role of the special needs teacher is based on individualised attention. There is constant need to restructure class arrangement and management to daily meet the educational needs of students (Boujut, Popa-Roch, Palomares, Dean & Cappe, 2017). The teacher is required to be as flexible as possible to tailor the different class activities as per the challenges that each disability manifests in the classroom. It could be argued that the mind of the special needs teacher, compared to mainstream schools, is constantly strategising, and are often left to their own devices in the absence of role clarity. In other words, the special needs teacher understands that the learners’ under his/her care need to acquire some form of basic skills; however, the “how element” of the skills acquisition of learners with disabilities is not clearly defined and rests on the teacher
to strategise and figure out. Based on the evidence discussed above, the following hypothesis is formulated;
Hypothesis 5: There is a significant, negative relationship between ambiguity of work and work engagement among special needs teachers in Windhoek, Namibia.