Thriving at work, i.e., the sense of learning and vitality, is an important indicator of individual psychological well-being. Understanding what promotes teachers' thriving is critical for effective school functioning. While accumulated studies have revealed the impact of work resources and contexts on teachers' thriving, we know little about whether students' behaviors will affect teachers' thriving. This is important to know because students' behaviors stand as an important work context facing teachers. And revealing how and when this happens will help scholars and practitioners further gain a better knowledge to foster teachers' thriving.
By integrating the interpersonal sensemaking theory into the socially embedded model of thriving at work, this study investigates whether, how, and when students' incivility, an increasingly common behavior in school, impacts teachers' thriving. We propose that students' incivility undermines teachers' work meaningfulness, thereby negatively affecting their thriving. Nevertheless, a high-quality leader-member exchange relationships with immediate supervisors are hypothesized to mitigate the detrimental effects of students' incivility on teachers' work meaningfulness and subsequent thriving. Results from a two-wave survey study involving 180 primary and secondary school teachers in the Guangdong Province of China support our hypotheses.
Our study contributes to extant literature in multiple ways. First, this study adds new knowledge to the antecedents of teachers' thriving at work from a teacher-student interaction perspective. The integration of the interpersonal sensemaking theory into the socially embedded model of thriving further enriches the theoretical foundations of existing thriving studies. Second, while existing studies have employed job characteristics model to reveal the impact of different job characteristics on teachers' work meaningfulness, our focus on the interpersonal sensemaking process preceding work meaningfulness extends this line of research. Third, on a practical level, the moderating role of LMX further enlightens practitioners regarding how to promote teachers' thriving by helping them cope with students' incivility.