Research On The Structure And Influential Mechanism Of Emotional Labor Among Teachers From Primary And Middle Schools

Teacher plays an important role in the education revolutionary. Most of the current researches about teacher only focus on the cognitive labor, instead of emotional labor, which becomes a core concept in this article. Basing on the comprehensive theories and psychometric methodology developed by foreign researchers, we develop the emotional labor scale for teachers, which is adaptive to domestic education status. The scale has put into operation among 873 teachers from primary and middle schools located in GuangDong province. The result shows that:(1) The emotional labor scale for teachers is composed of 34 items, which can be factored into 4 dimensions. Four dimensions are emotional labor perception, surface action, deep action, natural expression. The scale achieves good fitting indice and psychometric criteria; (2) Scores for teachers' emotional labor seems a bit high. Teachers from primary schools pay out more emotion than that from middle schools. As length of service increases, ascending trend for emotional labor scores is presented; (3) There is significant correlation between positive feeling experience and emotional labor. Extroversion is closely related to emotional labor, both total scale and sub-scales. Neuroticism and psychoticism show significant positive correlation with surface action; (4) Surface action demonstrates linear moderating effect on the influence between negative feeling experience toward job burnout. Subjective support and support utilization become moderators on the influence between emotional labor toward job satisfaction. All the moderating effect is available.