Emotional labour,teaching and burnout: Investigating complex relationships

ABSTRACT

Background: In common with other service-oriented occupations, teaching is a profession that requires employees to engage in emotional labour. In order to perform their day-to-day roles effectively, teachers are expected to manage and utilise their emotions in nuanced ways, with a high degree of control. As research suggests a complex relationship between emotional labour and occupational burnout, it is essential to examine this further in the context of teaching, so as to better understand the issues associated with teacher burnout.

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the literature on emotional labour and burnout, using the lens of sociological research to examine how multiple contexts shape people’s experiences in occupations. We present a theoretical discussion on how expectations for emotion displays and management, alongside structural factors, may shape the experiences of teachers.

Sources of evidence: We reviewed literature on emotional labour and burnout to examine this relationship within the context of contemporary constraints, including educational policies, accountability and emergent interpersonal dynamics in the everyday lives of school teachers. We focussed mainly on the United States public school system and used search terms including emotional labour, emotion work, emotion management and feeling rules. An inductive analytic strategy was used to identify common themes in the literature.

Findings and Conclusion: The thematic analysis of literature suggested that the intertwining of structural- and interactional-level expectations for emotional labour fosters close yet complicated relationships with teacher burnout. In bringing attention to these relationships, we offer suggestions as to the directions education researchers and administrators might take to better comprehend and address teacher burnout.