Personal resources and personal vulnerability factors at work: An application of the Job Demands-Resources model among teachers at private schools in Peru Sandra Corso-de-Zúñiga 1 & Bernardo Moreno-Jiménez 2 & Eva Garrosa 2 & Luis Manuel Blanco-Donoso 2 & Isabel Carmona-Cobo 3,4 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2017 Abstract We examine the role of personal resources (hardiness) and personal vulnerability factors (external locus of control and helpless- ness) at work, among 430 teachers at private schools. Based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and the conservation of resources theory, we parallel tested both motivational and health-impairment processes on the teachers’ individual outcomes. The JDR model’s motivational process was related to life satisfaction, and the health impairment process to perception of ill health. We hypothesize that hardiness will foster work engagement and that its role in the motivational process will be to mediate between job resources and work engagement. Then, we hypothesize that hardiness will prevent job burnout. Self-evaluations are expected to be activated by job burnout as an effect of its third dimension, inefficacy. We examine the mediational role of these self-evaluations between job burnout and ill health, and between job burnout and life satisfaction. The hypotheses are tested simultaneously using structured equation modelling. The results indicate that hardiness partially mediates the relationship between job resources and work engagement, and that hardiness reduces job burnout. Self-evaluations did not increase perception of ill health, but they did mediate the relationship between job burnout and life satisfaction. The findings show that hardiness plays the role of a personal resource in the motivational process and that it also has a preventive function against job burnout. Personal vulnerability factors, in the form of self-evaluations, were activated by job burnout, and their role was to significantly reduce life satisfaction. We discuss the implications of these findings. Keywords Work engagement . Job burnout . JD-R model . Hardiness . Personal vulnerability factors . Self-evaluations Teachers’ work engagement has a significant impact not only on their own well-being (Lorente 2008) and performance (Bakker and Bal 2010) but also on their students’ engagement (Roorda et al. 2011), an important driver of student academic success (Klem and Connell 2004). By contrast, stress and burnout in teachers have been associated with negative con- sequences for their health (Melamed et al. 2006), including more anger and less enjoyment (Keller et al. 2014), and with the use of more reactive and punitive responses that negatively impact the classroom climate and student-teacher relation- ships, among other negative consequences (Jennings and Greenberg 2009). Although school contexts vary across the world, Peruvian teachers face similar challenges as their colleagues in their daily work. Several studies have reported the presence of stress and burnout in the teacher population in Peru (Fernández 2008; Cuenca and O’Hara 2006; Yslado et al. 2010). However, the results of the studies on burnout are different, possibly because they are carried out with different populations (urban public schools, rural public schools and both public and private schools). While most of the empirical studies in Peru have fo- cused on teachers who work at public schools, this research intends to gain a better understanding of teachers who work at private schools. Previous studies indicate that organizational characteristics such as job resources and job demands are antecedents in teachers’ motivation and the development of job burnout (Bakker and Bal 2010; Hakanen et al. 2006; Lorente 2008), * Sandra Corso-de-Zúñiga sm.corsoo@up.edu.pe 1 Escuela de Postgrado, Universidad del Pacífico, Lima, Peru 2 Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain 3 Universidad Católica de Temuco, Temuco, Chile 4 Universidad de Jaén, Jaén, España Current Psychology https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-017-9766-6