Job Attitude Profiles among Public School Paraprofessionals in South Korea

The purpose of this study was to classify the job attitude profiles of public school paraprofessionals and to investigate how positive psychological capital, job crafting, organizational culture, and authentic leadership, identified as significant predictor variables through prior research, affected the paraprofessionals’ job attitudes. The subjects of this study worked at public elementary schools belonging to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education in Seoul, Korea. The final data of 691 samples were collected through proportionate stratified sampling. The collected data were analyzed using cross-tabulation, one-way ANOVA, multi-nominal logistic regression analysis, and latent profile analysis. There are three major findings. First, four job attitude types were identified: ideal job performance, job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, and livelihood. Second, there were significant differences in the effects of positive psychological capital, job crafting, school organizational culture, and the principal’s authentic leadership by job attitude type. The means for each variable were significant, with the highest means for the ideal job performance type, followed by those for job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, and livelihood. Finally, paraprofessionals in the ideal job performance type and job satisfaction type groups were compared with those in the livelihood type group, while gender, education, hope, friendly culture, and conservative culture were common influential variables. The results of this study provide practical implications for the personnel management of public school paraprofessionals and for improving their job attitudes.