Journal of Advance Research in Business Management and Accounting

Our study examines the mechanisms of retention for non-mechanized and unpaid teachers (NU/NP) in public schools or institutions under the Protestant conventionized system, not as an act of volunteerism, but as a dialectical phenomenon shaped by the tension between commitment and constraint. Based on a mixed survey conducted with NU/NP teachers, school principals, and Protestant coordinators, we showed that the permanence of these teachers cannot be explained solely by vocation, nor by the painful coexistence of these two logics. The dialectical thematic analysis of the respondents’ statements reveals pairs of opposing forces: vocation/exploitation, hope/slowness, divine service/survival. Thus, 74.8% of respondents simultaneously express a missionary attachment to the school and a feeling of experienced distributive injustice. This contradiction, far from causing a break, actually drives retention itself: the expectation, Legitimate faith, fear of losing accumulated seniority, but also the lack of job opportunities elsewhere; all prevent people from leaving. On the institutional side, managers maintain this paradox through a multi-valued discourse, mixing structural helplessness with the instrumentalization of faith. The study concludes that keeping NU/NP loyal is dialectical because it doesn’t rely on satisfaction, but on the impossibility of choosing between staying out of conviction and leaving out of dignity. It makes recommendations to the State: increase the number of schools, ensure retirement and mechanization for NU and NP; to the Church, to avoid reassuring NU and NP that their future mechanization is the State’s responsibility through religious discourse and unkept promises.