162 private universities teachers in Shanghai, China. Their demographic information was shown in Table 1.

Use the Questionnaire Star to distribute the scales and collected the data on line. The notification of the participants’ informed consent was contained in the questionnaire to participate in the study. 163 subjects were recruited totally, and the data of one of them was deleted because it was not completed. The test time was from June to July 2021. Use SPSS16.0 and AMOS24.0 for data sorting and analysis.

A descriptive statistical analysis was made based on the scores of Shanghai private colleges’ teachers on the organizational support, psychological contract, and job satisfaction scales. The results were shown in Table 2.

In general, the participants’ perceived organizational support, psychological contract and the job satisfaction were at a moderate level. In detail, the emotional support was evenly higher than instrumental support, while the transactional contracts score more than relational contracts and developmental contracts. However, among the job satisfaction variable, the score of the job motivation satisfaction was lower than the scores of the autonomy satisfaction, job stress satisfaction and management factor satisfaction.

Person Correlation Analysis was carried out on the scores of the subjects in the three scales. The results were shown in Table 3: There is a significant correlation between each of the three variables at the level of 0.01.

Since the conceptual structure of the three core variables concerned in this research covers two or more dimensions, the structural equation model was used

Note: ** means statistically significant at the 0.01 level.

to test the interaction between the three variables. Before implementing such test, it should be determined and purified the predictive power of each demographic variable on the three variables. Therefore, the regression analyses were performed with the general information of the subjects (including gender, age, marital status, working years, and education level and job position) as predictors, and the organizational support, psychological contract and job satisfaction as the predictive variables. The results were shown in Tables 4-6: the subjects’ basic information variables had no significant effect on the scores of organizational support, psychological contract, and job satisfaction.

Based on the above, the conceptual model of the relationship between the three variables in Figure 1 was tested and analyzed with using the AMOS24.0. The results are shown in Table 7 and Table 8: the model Chi-square value/degree of freedom was 3.256 with the significant p value of 0.000 levels; among the estimated results of the path coefficients in the model, except for the path coefficients with “psychological contract” pointing to “job satisfaction”, other path coefficients were all significant, In terms of model fitting degree, CFI, NFI, GFI and IFI indexes were all greater than 0.9, but the RMSEA index did not meet the standard, indicating that the model need to be revised.

Subsequently, removed the path from “psychological contract” to “job satisfaction”, and added the path from “psychological contract” to “job incentive satisfaction” according to the model revision index to output the revised model (see Figure 2); The revised structure model was tested again using AMOS24.0. The path coefficient estimation and model fitting index were shown in Table 9 and Table 10.

The above results showed that the revised model fits well and it was an acceptable model.

The present research firstly focused on the current status of the private university teachers in terms of organizational support, psychological contract and job satisfaction. The survey results showed that, overall, the scores of the three variables were generally above the mean level, those indicated that the status of organizational support, psychological contract and job satisfaction of teachers in private universities were normally good. However, it was worth noting that the transactional contract scores on the psychological scale indicated that the subjects’ attitudes to the positive statements of each test item ranged from “disagreeing” to “unclear”. It could be inferred that the condition of the teacher in the transactional contract was not very well. Such results were consistent with the survey results of teachers’ job satisfaction from other private universities in Guangdong and Henan in China recently years (Wang, et al., 2019 [23]; Feng, 2013 [24]).

Such results indicated that the job satisfaction of teachers in private universities were generally low. It was consistent with the results which the domestic scholars in China conducted a comparative study on the job satisfaction of teachers in private universities and public universities and found that the job satisfaction of teachers in private universities was significantly lower than that of teachers in public universities. The root cause of such phenomenon due to work pressure caused by factors such as staffing system, social welfare, and income, therefore, teachers in public universities difficultly established and consolidated their psychological contracts was that compared with public universities. It was required urgent attention (Yang, 2017) [25].

Consistent with the results of existing researches in domestic China (Tian & Suo, 2020 [9]; Wang, et al., 2013 [14]; Lu et al., 2013 [18]; Zhang, et al., 2015 [19]), the present research found a significant positive correlation between organizational support, psychological contract and job satisfaction, indicating that there was a covariant relationship between strong organizational support and the consolidation of psychological contract and the effective improvement to employee job satisfaction. On this basis, the focus on the present research was, for a relatively special group of private university teachers, what was the “individual-organization” interaction mechanism for a change in job satisfaction. That is, to explore how the organizational support and teachers’ psychological contract affect their job satisfaction.

In this regard, we analyzed data onto constructing a structural equation model. The steps were as follows: Firstly, to build a hypothetical model of job satisfaction, organizational support and psychological contract among private university teachers based on the existed literature. Secondly, used AMOS24.0 to test it. Thirdly, combining the significance results of each path coefficient of the model and the fitting index to revise the hypotheses model; and at last, the adjusted model was drawn according to the model revision index. The result showed that the hypotheses of the model about the “job satisfaction” were predicted by the “organizational support” as well as the “psychological contract” was predicted by the “organizational support” were confirmed. And then, as the path of the “psychological contract” to the “job satisfaction” was adjusted with “psychological contract” to “job incentive satisfaction”, the theoretical model and data fit better. The inference could be made was that for private universities teachers, organizational support had a significant impact on the consolidation of their psychological contract and the improvement of job satisfaction at all levels. However, in terms of the relationship between psychological contract and job satisfaction, there were inconsistent results which “psychological contract has a significant impact on all dimensions of job satisfaction” that obtained from other subjects’ groups of the existing surveys. The results of the present research showed that the psychological contract for the teachers with their university was significantly impacted by the support that they gained from their organizations, but its effect did not generalize to affect the satisfaction indicators involving all levels of work, but only made a significant contribution to the job satisfaction of the teacher’s own sense of the job motivation.

In order to gain a deeper insight into the meaning of this result, we further analyzed the five test items of “job motivation satisfaction”, the specific contents were: “My job gives me the opportunity to develop my talents”, “I often experience it at work. I am satisfied with different things”, “This job allows me to get good evaluation and recognition among relatives, friends and neighbors”, “The current job can give me opportunities for promotion” and “I can get a sense of accomplishment from my work”. We found that among the various dimensions of job satisfaction, the score of “job incentive satisfaction” was the lowest compared with the other three dimensions. In addition, the effective support provided by the organization based on the two-pronged approach from instrumental and emotional could strengthen the psychological contract of the teachers to the university and work they engaged in, and directly predict the degree of the job motivation satisfaction.

In fact, this result fits perfectly with the current living conditions of teachers in private universities in China. From the perspective of phenomenon, the staff of private universities in China was not within the government public educational system, and caused by this, the low government investment, low income and welfare, limited development space made this group was very special; and when a teacher was learned that he (she) was working in a private university, his (her) professionalism and authority were instantly discounted, and even the original respect to them as the “college teachers” was also greatly discounted. Although the private universities teachers’ academic structure, professional qualities, academic qualifications, and research capabilities had all made qualitative leaps in recent years, but their social status had not been improved accordingly.

However, as the employment situation of highly educated talents has become more and more tense in the recent past, private universities have broadened their horizons, and their ideas for running schools have become more flexible. Many individual teachers of private universities had also gradually changed their self-identity, their recognition of the development of private universities and the profession of teachers in private universities had been significantly improved. The foundation of such change was that they found that private universities had paid more attention to the introduction and practice of advanced educational concepts in the way of running schools to reflect the essence of education, and to highlight the diversified development of teachers’ careers in teacher training. In terms of salary management, it could reflect the fairness of “ability-job-salary” matching. These factors were gradually enhancing the professional identity confidence in private universities and individual teachers. That is to say, for teachers in private colleges and universities, on the scale of weighing their professional status, their attentions to the recognition and sense of accomplishment from their work has gradually exceeded the weight of social evaluation standards.

The conclusions mentioned above could provide the enlightenment for the teachers development practice of the private university in China: under the condition that the staff system of the government and other macro support could not be changed, to recognize of teachers’ value, to affirm their work results, and to pay attention to their development space in the internal schooling process of private universities, were all the key way to enhance the job satisfaction with teachers, consolidate their psychological contract, and reduce their turnover rate of the current era.