Emotional labor, burnout and emotional well-being in educational professions: a research on Italian public and private school teachers and sports instructors

Aims to analyse the relations between emotional labor on the one hand, and burnout and emotional well-being on the other among teachers and sports instructors. In Study 1, 150 Italian teachers of private and public schools were provided with the Emotion Work Requirement Scale (EWRS, Best, Downey, & Jones, 1997), the Emotional Labor Scale (ELS, Brotheridge & Lee, 1998; 2003), the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS, Leiter & Maslach, 2005) and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS, Watson, Lee, & Tellegen, 1988; 1994). In Study 2, 102 Italian swimming instructors were provided with the same scales. Results show that both teachers and sports instructors are requested to express and not hide emotions at work, and both engage more in surface acting than in deep acting. Among teachers, surface acting is correlated with emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and emotional well-being. Among sports instructors, surface acting is correlated only with cynicism. In both groups the request to hide emotions is correlated with surface acting, cynicism, and emotional well-being. We also found higher levels of cynicism and lower levels of sense of efficacy and emotional well-being among teachers of private schools than teachers of public schools. Finally, the comparison between teachers and instructors shows that the latter engage in both surface and deep acting more than the former. These results highlight the high emotional demand of some educational professions, and provide evidence of the relationships between the surface acting strategy of emotion regulation and personal and organizational well-being.