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his research had several limitations, understanding this could help some researchers avoid these types of problems. The fist limitation is in regard with the gender of the participants;86% of the participants were women. The gap between the male and female participants is too broad, leaving us without a clear idea if male teachers feel differently when it comes to job burnout and job standardization; perhaps a more controlled surveying method could provide us with a richer male perspective.
The second limitation was the target population of this research; only private middle school teachers are not enough of a sample to generalize the results of the research. However, the high levels of economic inequality in Honduras makes it hard to reach out to public school teachers. Many public school teachers have to work in extremely rural areas, in schools that lack the resources for them to communicate with the exterior. Many of these schools do not have internet or computers. Teachers in the working in the public sector of Honduras have to follow completely different standards, generally, they have more students to deal with, some of them work in two classrooms at a time, their salaries a very load, and their living conditions are not the same to private school teachers. Indicating that this study cannot be generalized to all teachers in Honduras.
The third limitation is that this data was self-reported. This could mean that the participants were not completely honest. This is a limitation because honesty was key for this research because they had to tell us if they felt their jobs burned them out. This might happen
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because in Honduras employees are suspicious when it comes to surveys because there have been cases in which the information was released and they were affected by it. In case some of the participants believed this might have been a decisive factor for the results, the data might not be completely sincere.
The fourth and final limitations was the survey design, which is a cross-sectional design.
This study considers that cross-sectional design has a limitation that cannot accurately identify the causal relationship between independent and dependent variables.
Implications
The main goal of this study was to demonstrate that job standardization was not helping teachers in a positive way, this was because the researcher believed that all the extra steps they had to follow to achieve a certain task will make them work harder and increase their workload.
For this study, it was also thought that this limited teachers’ creativity and freedom, making them feel trapped and less accomplished professionals. It was assumed that if middle school teachers had a positive psychological capital they would be happier at their jobs and would not feel job burnout as much as initially thought they did. Finally, this study originally believed that because of all what job standardization stands for they would have a heavier workload and this would increase their level of job burnout. Nevertheless, the complete opposite was found after analyzing the data; this does not mean that these findings cannot be used in a positive way to help teachers and the administrative office of the schools.
As this study found job standardization reduces job burnout rather than increases it, schools should try to find effective ways to standardize teachers school works. In general, teachers have many responsibilities in their jobs, every day they have to deal with these responsibilities in order to be able to achieve their personal goals and the standards and goals set by the school system, the governments, and in general the other countries. All of these responsibilities amounts to what workload was referred as. By utilizing this study, employers
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can try to create a better balance between standardization and workload, thus avoiding job burnout and having more accomplished and satisfied teachers. Curriculum developers can try to have a better understanding of what job burnout is, the effects it has, and how children with teachers who suffer from burn out are affected. Parents are also responsible for understanding what job standardization is, most of the time they was individual attention for their children and because of the workload teachers are not able to provide this properly. If parents stopped doing this teachers could feel even less stress and would be able to perform better at their jobs.
Schools should also provide instructions with detailed standardized procedures to guide teachers to handle all the necessary tasks every day.
If other researches and human resource professionals decide to use this study, they could understand if job standardization is a positive aspect in every job, not only in the education field. This would be beneficial because sometimes job standardization is not helping the worker in a positive manner, and by limiting them, they are affecting them in a counterproductive way.
Even this study did not find the moderating effect of psychological capital, researchers and other human resource professionals could still use this study to have a better understanding of what important role psychological capital plays for service-oriented jobs. This would help them create better environments for their employees, and a better product or service for their customers.
Psychological capital is a term that is not very common in research when it comes to administrative sciences. In this study it did not prove to be a significant moderator between job standardization and job burnout. However, in the results of this study it could observe somewhat of an effect between psychological capital and job burnout. This could mean that if companies worked harder on developing better psychological capital for their employees, they could perhaps have happier employees with a better quality of life.
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