Workplace buoyancy is defined as a teachers’ personal resource used by the individual to help thwart or navigate challenges in the workplace. The study claims that this is different from the concept of resilience, because resilience generally refers to the ability to get through chronic or extremely difficult situations, while workplace buoyancy is simply the ability to successfully navigate everyday work challenges. Therefore, the main difference is in the degree of the challenge, and the relative recurrence of the same difficulties.

For example, during COVID-19, a main challenge for many teachers was having to rapidly adjust to online learning, figuring out how to navigate their work-home life now that they were in the same place, and learning how to accommodate diverse situations in students’ homes.

In past studies, workplace buoyancy has been shown to alleviate disengagement in work, and has been associated with lower ‘failure avoidance motivation’, which is defined as motivation driven solely by a personal fear of failure.

This study hypothesized that workplace buoyancy would be negatively associated with the three dependent variables of the study: somatic burden, stress related to change, and emotional exhaustion, because teachers that had high workplace buoyancy would be able to navigate the difficult circumstances of COVID-19 and online learning.