Pre-service teachers’ wellbeing and occupational commitment: The role of motivation and coping

Abstract Given the growing concern regarding new teacher supply and the increasing demands for cultivating classroom-ready teachers, there is a pressing need to explore factors associated with pre-service teachers’ wellbeing. Yet exploration of the relationships between pre-service teachers’ motivation, self-beliefs, mental health, and job-related outcomes has been scarce. This study investigates the associations among motivational factors (autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, and self-efficacy), coping behaviours (engagement coping and disengagement coping), psychological wellbeing, and affective occupational commitment, which reflect the emotional attachment to the teaching profession. An integrative model of motivation and coping, synthesising self-determination theory and the cognitive-motivational-relational theory, was adapted for this analysis. In a sample of 677 pre-service teachers in Australia, structural equation modelling revealed that autonomous motivation and self-efficacy were positively associated with engagement coping and psychological wellbeing. Notably, autonomous motivation showed the strongest positive direct relationship with affective occupational commitment, whereas disengagement coping showed the strongest negative relationship with psychological wellbeing. The findings demonstrated the mediating effects of coping behaviours and psychological wellbeing, revealing the unexpected positive mediation by disengagement coping between autonomous motivation and psychological wellbeing. Overall, this study enriches the understanding of factors related to pre-service teachers’ psychological wellbeing and provides a novel theoretical contribution by empirically validating the integrated model in teacher education. It offers practical implications for initial teacher education providers, suggesting a need for targeted interventions to sustain pre-service teachers’ motivation, coping abilities, wellbeing, and commitment, thereby addressing teacher shortages and attrition.