College Counselors’ Emotional Labor: Characteristics And Relationship With Job Burnout

With the development of psychological counseling, occupational psychology on collegecounselors has gradually got the attention by researchers. But the current studies mostly focus onthe cultivation of counselors, their competence, mental health status and motivation of engaged inthe industry, etc.. there are very few studies on counselor’s emotional labor which is the typicalcharacteristics of counseling. Emotional labor refers to college counselors apply strategies toadjust their emotional according to counseling situation for the object of service. Some researchaboout other industries point out that emotional labor maybe lead to tension, appropriateemotional labor may improve the work performance and job satisfaction, and affective disordermaybe lead to emotional exhaustion. Therefore, discussing the features of college counselors’emotional labor and its relationship with job burnout will help to reveal their work characteristicsand psychological characteristics, improve their counseling achievements, and provide theoreticalbasis for college counselors’ education and training. This study used the Chen Yun adaptation ofemotional labor scale (2008), conducted the questionnaire survey for195both full-time andpart-time counselors in colleges and universities in Zhejiang. By means of descriptive statisticsanalysis, correlation analysis, independent sample t test, single factor analysis of variance andmultiple comparison and other methods, investigated systematically the structure, characteristicsand individual difference of college counselors’ emotional labor, and the relationship betweenemotional labor and job burnout. Main conclusions as follows:(1) Emotional labor is amultidimensional structure which is made of surface acting, emotional display rules, deep actingand emotional diversity.(2) College counselors have high-level emotional labor, especially inthree aspects of deep acting, emotional diversity, and emotional display rules, and surface actingis relatively lower.(3) College counselors’ emotional labor has significant differences inprofessional title and not in work years and age. Counselors with higher titles have high levelemotional labor, mainly in surface acting. Female college counselors’ emotional display rules issignificantly higher than male.(4) In general, emotional labor is negatively related to job burnout.Specifically, the higher emotional labor is, the lower the sense of achievement is; surface actingeasily lead to emotional exhaustion, deindividuation and job burnout. If counselors’ acting issuitable for the requirements of emotional expression their sense of achievement will be higher,and their job burnout will be lower. Besides, deep acting, emotional display rules and emotionalvariety all increase the sense of achievement and reduce job burnout.