Teacher Autonomy and Personality Traits: A Comparative Study of Iranian Male and Female EFL Teachers

Teacher autonomy and teacher personality, both affecting teaching and learning processes are focused on in this study. So, SPSS-26 was conducted based on the 156 Iranian EFL teachers (63 males and 93 females) online responses to the Teacher Autonomy Scale designed by Pearson and Moomaw and NEO Five-Factor Personality Inventory suggested by Costa Jr. and McCrae. As a result, Extraversion stayed in the first place among the Big Five traits of personality, according to its correlation degree to teacher autonomy, which was assessed as very strong, pushing Neuroticism to the last stand, assessed as weak. Other findings are as follows: a) male teachers naturally felt more sense of autonomy than females did; b) females can be more negatively affected by the people and things surrounding them; c) males are more extraverted than females; d) males generally tended to experience new things more than females did; e) agreeableness was more dominant in the females character compared to the males character, and f) males were usually more conscientious than females. Finally, Self-Determination Theory was applied to support the above inferences.