Abstract The long-term sustainability of educational systems depends not only on structural conditions but also on teachers’ capacity to maintain effective professional functioning under persistent instructional, relational, and organizational demands. Although teacher stress has been widely examined, stress-centered explanations alone do not fully account for variation in teachers’ occupational self-efficacy. The present manuscript develops and reports an integrative structural model in which emotion regulation operates as a personal resource, burnout reflects resource depletion, and work engagement functions as a motivational mechanism linking resources to professional confidence. Framed by Social Cognitive Theory and the Job Demands–Resources model, the article reports a coherent structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis for a sample of 412 in-service teachers. The model demonstrated good fit, χ²/df = 2.41, CFI = .94, TLI = .93, RMSEA = .052, SRMR = .047. Work engagement emerged as the strongest direct predictor of occupational self-efficacy (β = .49, p < .001), whereas burnout showed a substantial negative effect (β = −.41, p < .001). Emotion regulation predicted self-efficacy directly (β = .34, p < .001) and indirectly through work engagement (β = .18, p < .001). The findings support the argument that sustainable teacher functioning is best understood as the outcome of interacting emotional, motivational, and depletion-related processes rather than as the simple absence of stress. Implications are discussed for teacher development, school leadership, and sustainable educational policy. Keywords: teacher self-efficacy; emotion regulation; burnout; work engagement; sustainable education; SEM; JD-R model.
Monica-Aneta Turturean (Fri,) studied this question.