engleski

Teachers' emotions and subjective well-being: The mediating role of emotional labor strategies

Research on teachers’ emotions conducted over the past years clearly indicate that emotions are core components of teachers’ lives. Teachers experience a wide variety of both positive and negative emotions in relation to their professional roles and activities. For example, teachers may feel joy and satisfaction when students learn and make progress, frustration and anger when students misbehave or helplessness when, in spite of all the efforts invested, students refuse to engage in learning activities. Such emotions may influence teachers’ performance and relationships with students, but also their sense of well-being. Moreover, teachers are obliged to follow particular emotional display rules when managing their emotions, i.e. they must perform emotional labor which can also have adverse effects on their well-being. Thus, the aim of this study was to examine relationships between teachers’ emotions, emotion labor strategies and well-being, i.e. to test the mediating role of emotional labor in explaining the relationship between teachers’ emotions and well-being. The study was conducted at the end of the school year on the sample of 391 elementary school teachers employed in 32 schools located in 19 different towns and municipalities mostly located in central and eastern regions of Croatia (297 were female, 82 were male, and 12 did not indicate their gender). On average, the teachers were 41.73 years old (SD=10.31) and had 15.05 years of teaching experience (SD=10.92). Teachers filled out self-report scales aimed at assessing emotions they experience in relation to their students (joy, pride, anger, fatigue, helplessness), emotional labor strategies (surface and deep acting), and different components of subjective well-being (satisfaction with life, positive experiences and job satisfaction). In order to answer the research question, and by using SEM techniques, two competing models were tested: 1) Emotional labor strategies partially mediate the relationship between emotions and well-being ; and 2) Emotional labor strategies fully mediate the relationship between emotions and well-being. The obtained results clearly indicated better fit of the partial mediation model to the data ; emotions explained the variance of well-being both directly and indirectly via emotional labor strategies. Moreover, the direction of the associations among variables in the model were as expected. Teachers who experience more positive emotions use deep acting to a greater extent and have higher levels of subjective well-being. On the contrary, teachers who experience more negative emotions, use more surface acting and less deep acting in order to manage their emotions, and report lower levels of subjective well-being. Finally, more surface acting was associated with less well-being and vice versa.

teachers; emotions; emotional labor; subjective well-being

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