On the relationship among Iranian EFL teacher private life stress, their perception of administrative support, teacher creativity and job burnout

In any foreign language setting, there are some variables that play an essential role in teachers' behavior and consequently learner's performance. Two of these important social psychological variables are teacher creativity and burnout. Also administrative support and teacher's private life stress can have negative or positive effect on teacher's creativity and burnout. The research method is descriptive-correlational and the respondents were 202 teacher's of public and private schools in Lorestan province. The aim of the study was to explore the correlation between life stress of Iranian (EFL) teachers, their perceived administrative support, creativity styles and reports of burnout with respect to demographic variables. The data were gathered through the application of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach & Jackson 1981, 1986) the creativity style questionnaire by Kumar and Holman (1997) , Perceived Stress Scale created by Cohen( 1994, and teacher’s Perceptions of Administrative Support scale of Weiss’ (2001). After obtaining the raw data, the SPSS software (version 16) was used to provide numerical interpretable data, using Pearson Product-Moment correlation analysis to determine any significant relationship between variables. The result showed that there is significant positive relationship between stress and burnout , negative relationship between stress and creativity, burnout and creativity. Also there is positive relationship between administrative support and creativity and negative relationship between administrative support and burnout. Finally, using T-Test, the researchers found no significant differences in teachers’ creativity and burnout with respect to gender and age. Implications of the study are discussed, and suggestions for further research are made.