The teaching profession is an attractive job that guarantees stable income, retirement age and pension. Teachers can contribute to society while teaching. Nevertheless, job satisfaction of teachers is constantly falling. Although it is a popular job, ...
The teaching profession is an attractive job that guarantees stable income, retirement age and pension. Teachers can contribute to society while teaching. Nevertheless, job satisfaction of teachers is constantly falling. Although it is a popular job, teachers experience in stress and burnout. As teachers may affect students during interactions with students, teachers should be studied with students.
Teachers intervene and guide various problem behaviors as well as teaching classes and helping development of students, and perform various roles such as administrative works. Teachers necessarily experience job stress in job performance and negative emotions such as tension, desire frustration, anger, anxiety and depression. Job stress increases psychological burnout by decreasing passion for job. However, as not all teachers become psychologically exhausted because of job stress, we need to find methods to prevent and reduce elements to reduce and mitigate negative effects on psychological burnout of teachers.
Teachers interact with students through emotion, and are required to perform effective emotion control coercing feelings such as anger and taking care of students with generosity and passion. Therefore, teachers should be able to manage their feelings effectively, and have capabilities to provide desirable feelings with students as well as to manage their own emotions. Feelings of teachers affect students and teachers should be able to perform emotional labor expressing feelings different from what they really feel through appropriate feeling adjustment while performing teaching job.
Accordingly, this study tried to identify effects of job performance of teachers on psychological burnout from the perspective of sentimental work. It tried to identify difference in job stress, psychological burnout, and emotional labor according to individual characteristics variables, and confirmed effects of job stress on psychological burnout and its mediating effects on emotional labor. This study tried to provide direction of supports to mitigate and prevent psychological burnout of teachers and reasonable countermeasures and suggestions for further studies on psychological burnout by understanding emotional labor that teachers should perform.
Instruments used in this study to achieve the purpose of this study are as follows. To measure job stress of teachers, the measurement scale developed by Kang Mun‐il(2008) based on the studies of Parker and Decotiis(1983), and Quinn and Shepard(1974). To measure psychological burnout of teachers, Maslach Burnout Inventory(MBI) developed by Maslach and Jackson(1981) was used. To measure emotional labor of teachers, the questionnaire developed by Lee Jin‐wa(2007) for childcare teachers based on the study by Gilstrap(2005) was adjusted for middle and high school teachers. To explain research problems, Sobel‐est was performed to verify statistical significance after performing t‐test, Pearson correlation coefficient, multiple regression analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis.
Results of this study are as follows; first, the followings are differences in psychological variables according to individual characteristic variables. In job burden and psychological burnout which are sub factors of job stress, female teachers showed higher score than male teachers. Additionally, teachers in 20s and 30s showed higher score in emotional labor than teachers in 40s. In psychological burnout, middle school teachers showed higher score than high school teachers, and public school teachers showed higher score than private school teachers. Second, the followings are the effects of job stress and emotional labor of teachers on psychological burnout. Job stress was a statistically significant indicator of psychological burnout. As depression, job burden and time pressure, which are sub factors of job stress, were higher, psychological burnout became higher. Surface acting and deep acting, the sub factors of emotional labor, were statistically significant indicators of psychological burnout. Surfaceacting made positive effects on burnout and deep acting made negative effects. Third, deep acting, a sub factor of emotional labor, was confirmed to have mediating effects on the relationship between job stress and psychological burnout. In other words, with higher job stress, psychological burnout becomes higher but because of mediating effects of deep acting, the effects of job stress on psychological burnout gets reduced.
Based on the results of this study, several discourses and suggestions were proposed regarding methods to reduce psychological burnout by performing emotional labor with positive attitudes. First, it was confirmed that job performance of teachers as emotional labor made effects on psychological burnout. It proposes that discussion of emotional labor should be expanded to teachers. Second, it can be used as basic materials for studies regarding emotional labor of teachers by reviewing both positive and negative results of emotional labor. It identified psychological conflicts and proposed base materials to identify complaints and problems of teachers. Third, as deep acting out of emotional labor is useful for reduction of psychological burnout, policy dimension efforts should be made to nurture deep acting of teachers. It is expected to many in‐epth and multi‐aceted follow‐p studies to see teaching job as emotional labor will follow based on the results of this study.