Emotional labor,teacher burnout,and turnover intention in high-school physical education teaching

Abstract

Grounded upon the conservation of resources theory, this study sought to examine the relationships between the three emotional labor strategies, teacher burnout, and turnover intention among physical education teachers. A total of 613 high-school physical education teachers from 47 states across the United States completed online questionnaires that measured the proposed variables. The goodness-of-fit statistics indicated that the structural model showed a reasonable fit, χ²(605) = 1391.26 = 2.30, p < 0.01; RMSEA = .05; TLI = .93; CFI = .93. The results also revealed that teacher burnout was positively associated with surface acting and negatively associated with genuine expression. Further, teacher burnout was positively associated with turnover intention. Mediation analysis showed that teacher burnout fully mediated the trajectory from emotional labor strategies to turnover intention. The results highlight the impact of emotional labor on physical education teachers’ well-being and intention to leave the teaching profession.

Keywords

Coping strategy emotional demands emotional regulation surface acting teacher retention

Introduction

Teaching is a well-known context for generating many emotional demands as it involves high levels of face-to-face interaction with key stakeholders (e.g. students, colleagues, administrators, and parents; Gu and Day, 2007). However, these emotional demands are associated with negative consequences such as teacher burnout, job dissatisfaction, and decreased enthusiasm (see Kinman et al., 2011; Kunter et al., 2011). Emotional labor, defined as teachers’ efforts to manage unpleasant emotions and to express socially acceptable emotions (Isenbarger and Zembylas, 2006), is a recent psychological construct that addresses how workers can effectively deal with such emotional incidents at work (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015). Upon encountering stressful situations, teachers who purposefully produce and display situation-appropriate emotions without revealing their true emotions are said to engage in emotional labor. Indeed, several education researchers have addressed the importance of emotional labor in attaining teaching goals and sending “we care” messages to students (Isenbarger and Zembylas, 2006). However, the side effect of intentional emotional control is potential harm to individuals’ well-being (Mauss et al., 2007). This implies that, while teachers strive to control their emotions for students’ benefit (Shoval et al., 2010), the process may gradually decrease their well-being and adversely affect job-related attitudes, such as teacher burnout and turnover intention (Chau et al., 2009; Goodwin et al., 2011; Grandey and Gabriel, 2015; Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011).

Interest in emotional labor in the physical education (PE) setting is warranted (Stuhr et al., 2012) because the unique characteristics of the context (e.g. physical structure of the classroom setting, occupational duties, the level of perceived social support, and the status of the teachers and the subject) can potentially elicit highly emotionally challenging incidents (see Macdonald, 1995; Spittle et al., 2015). Despite the findings showing the importance of emotional labor in other domains, there is limited research on this topic in PE settings (Lee et al., 2016). Thus, to fill the void, this study examined how the different emotional labor strategies influence teacher burnout, which in turn influences the intention to quit teaching among PE teachers. More specifically, grounded in the conservation of resources theory (COR; Hobfoll, 1989), the purpose of this study was to investigate: (a) the relationships between the three emotional labor strategies and teacher burnout; (b) the relationships between teacher burnout and turnover intention; and (c) the mediating role of teacher burnout in the relationship between emotional labor strategies and turnover intention.

PE teaching context

Previous literature has noted that PE teachers differ from classroom teachers in terms of the physical structure of the classroom, the characteristics of the teaching content, occupational duties, and the status of the subject and the teachers (Koustelios and Tsigilis 2005; Tsigilis et al., 2011). These differences can potentially elicit unique challenges and high levels of emotion among PE teachers (Spittle et al., 2015). For example, PE classes usually take place in open spaces such as gyms, tracks, and playgrounds. This allows students to consider PE classes as places where they can release their surplus energy (Macdonald, 1995). However, as PE classes potentially involve dangerous activities including contact sports and gymnastics (Spittle et al., 2015), the environment can create more disciplinary incidents and safety concerns compared with classroom settings and requires constant alertness by PE teachers (Shoval et al., 2010). As student-related issues are one of the most significant factors generating teachers’ negative emotions (Hancock and Scherff, 2010), these idiosyncratic features may place intense emotional demands on PE teachers. In addition, PE classes are frequently “being watched” (p. 136) by other school actors such as principals, other teachers, and parents, without adequate notification, as well as by the public such as followers and spectators of sports competitions (Macdonald, 1995). This is an additional factor that may impose emotional demands.

The wide variety of occupational duties inherent in PE teaching may increase the emotional demands on teachers. It is true that all teachers are required to fulfill generic roles such as teaching, managing, and mentoring students, paperwork, and administration (Richards, 2015). However, PE teachers are frequently expected to engage in diverse roles of athletic coaches, sport competition organizers, student–athlete counselors, and sports referees, which often results in excessive workloads (O’Connor and Macdonald, 2002). These excessive work demands can cause a roller coaster of intense emotions and stress (Liston et al., 2006).

Finally, although PE teachers perform a wide variety of duties, they are often deemed “low status” (UNESCO, 2014) and “marginal” (Shoval et al., 2010) because key stakeholders tend to attribute less importance to PE as a subject (Kougioumtzis et al., 2011). PE classes are canceled readily and PE teachers tend to receive inadequate support from their school; subsequently, they experience isolation and little professional adult interaction in the school context (Shoval et al., 2010). As perceptions of marginalization and isolation often lead to job dissatisfaction and impaired self-confidence, which in turn produce stress and anxiety (Reichenberg et al., 2000; UNESCO, 2014), these latent unpleasant feelings need to be modified, making emotional labor a necessity for PE teachers.

Literature review

Conceptual model development

As can be seen in Figure 1, the conceptual model that investigates the relationships between emotional labor strategies, teacher burnout, and turnover intention was developed. Given that the PE context contains several stressors (Spittle et al., 2015), understanding the role of emotional labor as a coping strategy is warranted. Thus, this conceptual model sought to describe how different emotional labor strategies would affect teacher burnout and turnover intention differently. This model particularly used the COR theory (Hobfoll, 1989) as a theoretical framework to explain how emotional labor can influence teacher burnout.

Figure 1.

Conceptual model for the relationships among three forms of emotional labor, the components of teacher burnout, and turnover intention. The (+) symbols represent hypothesized positive relationships and the (−) symbols represent hypothesized negative relationships. dotted lines represent insignificant relationships between the variables.

Conservation of resources theory

The tenets of COR theory are particularly relevant for the current conceptual model. COR suggests that when workers encounter emotional demands in the course of their work, they use their emotional resources in anticipation of reward (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002). When the future return is perceived to be lower than the investment of their emotional resources, they perceive this as a loss of resources and experience negative consequences. On the other hand, when the rewards outweigh emotional resources used, there is a net gain in terms of returned resources, and this enhances their eustress (beneficial stress) (Hobfoll, 1989). Mahoney et al. (2011) stated that professionals would be motivated to replenish their resources, maximize their gains in resources, and offset net losses by employing such strategies as replacement, coping, and appraisal.

In emotional labor research, there have been a few empirical studies that used COR to explain the relationship between emotional labor and individual outcomes. For example, Brotheridge and Lee (2002) and Glomb and Tews (2004) examined whether COR can explain the underlying mechanism of the relationship between emotional and job burnout among service employees. More recently, Mahoney et al. (2011) examined emotional labor and its association with such work outcomes as emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and affective commitment among college professors. All these research studies used COR to explain the differences in expenditure of resources and potential gains and losses between emotional labor strategies and their impact on individual outcomes.

In the PE teaching context, PE teachers inevitably encounter emotionally challenging incidents (e.g. student misconduct). As a coping process, teachers may engage in the emotional labor of investing their emotional resources with the expectation of receiving positive outcomes (gains) in return (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002). The positive outcomes can manifest as rewarding relationships, positive interactions, monetary compensation, and self-efficacy (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002). However, the outcomes can be differentiated depending on which emotional labor strategy they choose to adopt. For example, PE teachers experience negative outcomes either when the strategy depletes their resources or when returned resources are not perceived as valuable compared with expended emotional resources. On the other hand, they experience eustress when rewards outweigh their investment of emotional resources, with a net gain of resources (see Mahoney et al., 2011). Thus, the next section discusses the overall emotional labor construct and different facets of emotional labor strategies to provide a comprehensive understanding of which emotional labor strategies are beneficial and which are detrimental for their personal well-being.

General emotional labor construct

Grandey and Gabriel (2015) have proposed a conceptual framework for emotional labor to illustrate its special nature. They considered emotional labor an “umbrella” for a blended technique of emotional job requirements, internal emotional regulation, and emotional performance.

Emotional job requirements are typically organizations’ rules about emotional display. For example, flight attendants are often required to display positive emotions toward passengers (Grandey, 2000) and teachers are generally expected to display warmth and compassion and suppress anger towards pupils (Kinman et al., 2011). Internal emotional regulation consists of surface acting, deep acting, and genuine expression (Diefendorff et al., 2005; Grandey and Gabriel, 2015). Surface acting is the process of modifying one’s outer expression without altering interior feelings (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015). PE teachers who suppress their anger toward students’ disrespectful behaviors and fake outward displays of calmness exemplify surface acting. On the other hand, deep acting is an attempt to transform feelings into the organizations’ emotional requirements (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015). PE teachers who try to experience and express empathy by thinking that students’ aggressive behaviors may result from their low self-esteem exemplify deep acting. Genuine expression occurs when PE teachers experience appropriate emotions and express them automatically (Diefendorff et al., 2005). PE teachers who naturally feel excitement before class and express this emotion in front of students exemplify genuine expression. It is important to note that genuine expression is a strategy wherein the expressed emotions are congruent with the emotional requirements imposed by organizations (Diefendorff et al., 2005). When workers express their true emotions regardless of the expected norms (e.g. teachers’ spontaneous anger expressions toward pupils), they are said to engage in emotional deviance (Dahling, 2016), which may harm their schools and their image as ideal teachers. Finally, emotional performance refers to the individuals’ outward expressions that are visible to recipients. Recipients may assess the others’ observable expressions as either fake or authentic, which in turn can influence their impression and service evaluation (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015).

Teacher burnout

One of the most cited consequences of emotional labor is job burnout, defined as “an erosion of engagement. What started out as important, meaningful, and challenging work becomes unpleasant, unfulfilling, and meaningless” (Maslach et al., 2001: 416). Maslach et al. (2001) identified burnout’s components as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion reflects a lack of energy and feeling that one’s emotional resources are used up by excessive emotional demands at work. Depersonalization is defined as “an attempt to put distance between oneself and service recipients by actively ignoring the qualities that make them unique and engaging people” (Maslach et al., 2001: 403). Finally, reduced personal accomplishment reflects a lowered feeling about one’s ability and productivity at work.

A previous meta-analysis reported that the different facets of emotional labor consistently affect job burnout in different ways. Job burnout was positively linked to surface acting, but not to deep acting, and negatively linked to genuine expression (see a meta-analysis by Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011). For example, Chang (2013) reported that the emotional regulation strategy of faking and suppressing true emotions (i.e. surface acting) had a positive association with teacher burnout. Applying the tenets of COR theory to this result, Gross (2002: 289) stated that emotive suppression that entails purposeful self-control “consumes cognitive resources during the emotion regulation period” and leads to a loss of resources. Thus, those who constantly engage in deliberate emotional labor, such as surface acting, exhaust their internal resources and become burned out (Brotheridge and Lee, 2003).

However, previous findings about the relationship between deep acting and employee well-being have been equivocal: research has found positive, negative, or no relationship (see Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011). In education, Chang failed to find a significant association between the cognitive reappraisal strategy of emotional regulation (i.e. deep acting) and teacher burnout. Furthermore, Lee et al. (2016) found that genuine expression was negatively associated with emotional exhaustion among Korean PE teachers. Based on COR, Mahoney et al. (2011) stated that, as genuine expression leads naturally to a congruence between felt and expressed emotions, it barely generates psychological effort and consumes cognitive resources, which in turn can generate positive outcomes for individuals. Thus, this study hypothesized the following:

H₁: Surface acting will be positively related to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.

H₂: Genuine expression will be negatively related to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment.

Turnover intention

Turnover intention, defined by MacInerney et al. (2015: 11) as “the intention to leave the organization one is working for or to quit one’s profession and move to a different career pathway” is a major concern because of its detrimental effect on teaching effectiveness and educational institutions (Ronfeldt et al., 2013). For example, Gray and Taie (2015) reported that, among all beginning teachers in the United States from 2007 to 2008, 17% left the profession during their first 5 years. Moreover, the Alliance for Excellent Education (2014) reported that US$2.2 billion was spent annually to recruit and train new teachers. PE has also suffered from a high teacher attrition rate. For example, Evans and Williams (1989) found that the majority (80%) of male PE teachers in the United Kingdom were thinking of quitting their profession. More recently, Mäkelä et al. (2014a) found that 39% of Finnish PE teachers were considering leaving the teaching profession, even though their profession is highly regarded in Finland, while Mäkelä and Whipp (2015) reported that 40% of Australian PE teachers intended to leave the profession.

Studies have documented empirical evidence of significant relationships between the different emotional labor strategies and turnover intention. Goodwin et al. (2011) reported that surface acting had a direct positive relationship with employee turnover whereas deep acting had no such relationship. Previous literature has consistently identified emotional dissonance, defined as the mismatch between what a person feels and what s/he displays, as a primary precursor of turnover intention (Grandey, 2000). Thus, emotional dissonance derived from surface acting may manifest among PE teachers as a state of feeling uncomfortable about their work, which in turn influences turnover intention (Goodwin et al., 2011).

However, there may be no bridge to connect deep acting and genuine expression to turnover intention, as neither strategy creates emotional dissonance (Grandey, 2000). Thus, it is expected that both deep acting and genuine expression may not have significant associations with turnover intention. Accordingly, this study hypothesized the following:

H₃: Surface acting will be positively related to turnover intention.

Mediating role of teacher burnout

Past studies have shown that job burnout is positively related to turnover intention in teaching (Smith and Ingersoll, 2004; Spittle et al., 2015). Several studies have also found that burnout significantly mediates the relationship between various job stressors and work withdrawal behavior (Leiter and Maslach, 2009; Richards et al., 2016). Thus, surface acting, previously regarded as a source of stress (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015), may act as a job stressor that accentuates psychological depletion (teacher emotional exhaustion), causing counterproductive work behavior in teachers, for example, turnover, absenteeism, and poor work quality (Goodwin et al., 2011). Studies demonstrated that employees’ emotional exhaustion significantly mediated the relationship between surface acting and turnover intention (see Chau et al., 2009). Further, as no direct relationship between genuine expression (the independent variable) and turnover intention (the dependent variable) was proposed in this study, teacher burnout (the mediating factor) may fully mediate the genuine expression–turnover intention relationship. Therefore, this study hypothesized the following:

H₄: Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment will be positively related to turnover intention.

H₅: Teacher burnout will partially mediate the relationship between surface acting and turnover intention.

H₆: Teacher burnout will fully mediate the relationship between genuine expression and turnover intention.

Methods

Participants

The target population in this study was PE teachers who were currently working in public high schools in the United States. According to National Center for Education Statistics (2013), there were approximately 65,600 PE teachers in 2013 in the United States. Of those teachers, 63.5% were male, 83.3% were Caucasian, and 43.5% had a master’s degree. The email addresses of 3000 randomly selected high-school PE teachers across the United States were obtained from a commercial website (http://www.mchdata.com). However, 377 emails bounced back, which left 2623 teachers who were eligible to participate in the survey. Of these, 752 teachers completed the questionnaires for a response rate of 28.7%. However, 139 incomplete responses were excluded owing to their failure to answer several key survey items. Thus, 613 high-school PE teachers from 47 states were included in the final analysis, for a final response rate of 23.4%.

Participants were 58.4% male and the mean age was 45.58 years (SD = 10.76), ranging from 24 to 69 years old. The majority of participants had a master’s degree (66.9%) and were Caucasian (86.0%). Nearly 40% of participants worked in rural areas (39.8%) and nearly 40% in suburban areas (39.6%), whereas 20.4% of them worked in urban areas. Among 47 states, the largest represented state was California (9.7%), followed by New York and Illinois (7.7%), and then Wisconsin (5.1%). Respondents averaged 5.55 hours (SD = 5.07) of direct interaction with students per day and 20.36 (SD = 14.62) years’ teaching experience.

Procedures and instrumentation

Approval was obtained from the institution’s Human Subjects Research committees and pre-notification emails were sent to all participants. One week later, an email was sent containing a link to the online survey questionnaire, information about the study’s purpose, and forms for informed consent. A post-notification email was sent one week later to encourage participation. The online survey contained 48 items, including the Teacher Emotional Labour Strategy Scale (TELSS; 11 items), the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Educators Survey (MBI-ES; 22 items), the Turnover Intention Scale (TIS; four items), and demographic information (11 items).

Emotional labor strategies

The TELSS developed by Yin (2012) was used to assess the PE teachers’ adoption of different emotional labor strategies. The questionnaire has five items for the surface acting subscale, three for the deep acting subscale, and three for the genuine expression subscale (see Appendix 1). Scores were recorded on a seven-point Likert scale from one (very strongly disagree) to seven (very strongly agree). The scale had acceptable internal consistencies of .84 (surface acting), .70 (deep acting), and .67 (genuine expression) among Chinese teachers in a previous study (Yin, 2012) and was acceptable in the current study, with values of .81 (deep acting) and .91 (surface acting), except for genuine expression (Cronbach’s α of .67), which is similar to Yin’s (2012) study.

Teacher burnout

The MBI-ES was employed to assess PE teacher burnout (Maslach and Jackson, 1986). Teacher burnout is a second-order latent variable that consists of three dimensions of burnout: emotional exhaustion (nine items), depersonalization (five items), and reduced personal accomplishment (reverse-coded eight items). Respondents rated each item on a seven-point Likert scale from 0 (never) to six (almost daily). The scale’s reliability was acceptable at .87 for emotional exhaustion, .76 for depersonalization, and .91 for a reduced sense of personal accomplishment in previous research with American teachers (Chang, 2013) and showed good reliability in the current study (Cronbach’s α ranged from .77 to .92).

Turnover intention

The four-item TIS (Becker and Billings, 1993) was employed to measure PE teachers’ intention to quit (see Appendix 1). Each item was rated on a seven-point scale from one (very strongly disagree) to seven (very strongly agree). MacInerney et al. (2015) reported an acceptable alpha level of .87 for a sample of Hong Kong teachers and the current study also showed a good reliability of .87.

Data analysis

A four-step analysis was conducted. First, key assumptions about the data were evaluated before the statistical analysis. Specifically, the ratio of cases to observed variables was calculated (Kline, 2011) and missing data, outliers, normality, and linearity were checked (Tabachnick and Fidell 2013). After dealing with the key assumptions, descriptive statistics and the reliability of the variables were computed using SPSS 21.0. Third, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was utilized as a methodological tool to test the psychometric properties of the instruments and refine the model through examining the overall measurement model fit and how well individual items defined their assigned latent factors. Specifically, convergent validity was tested though factor loadings, composite reliability, and average variance extracted (AVE) scores (Teo et al., 2009), while discriminant validity was examined by comparing the squared correlation between the variable and associated variables and AVE values (Fornell and Larcker, 1981). Finally, the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was used to test all the hypotheses by assessing the structural coefficients of the relationships. Maximum likelihood estimation was used to evaluate the fit of the model. For relative chi-square, a value less than three represents acceptable data-model fit (Tabachnick and Fidell, 2013). For comparative fit indices (CFI) and Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), values higher than 0.90 represent an acceptable fit, and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) values lower than 0.06 represent a close fit (Hu and Bentler, 1999).

Results

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 presents descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations, skewness, and kurtosis) and correlations among the proposed variables. The results revealed that PE teachers used high levels of genuine expression most (M = 3.97; SD = .89), followed by deep acting (M = 3.49; SD = .84), and surface acting (M = 2.45; SD = .60). Means for teacher burnout show that participants scored low (i.e. depersonalization) to medium (i.e. emotional exhaustion) on the three dimensions of teacher burnout. In addition, the level of turnover intention among PE teachers was also low (M = 2.74; SD = 1.25).

Table 1.

Descriptive statistics and correlations among study variables.

Variables	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
1. SA
2. DA	.08*
3. GE	–.47**	.10**
4. EE	.43**	.00	–.32**
5. DP	.41**	–.04	–.34**	.65**
6. RA	.30**	–.16**	–.33**	.35**	.42**
7. TI	.26**	–.10*	–.27**	.58**	.48**	.43**
M	2.45	3.49	3.97	3.21	2.15	2.31	2.74
SD	.89	.84	.60	1.31	1.10	1.25	1.25
Skewness	.37	–.92	–.60	.47	1.25	.74	1.01
Kurtosis	–.40	1.00	1.44	–.53	1.10	.13	.83

Note. N = 613. SA: surface acting; DA: deep acting; GE: genuine expression; EE: emotional exhaustion; DP: depersonalization; RA: reduced personal accomplishment; TI: turnover intention.

* p < .05; ** p < .01

Psychometric properties and measurement model

CFA results revealed that the measurement model that included all variables showed an acceptable fit, χ² / df = 1317.74 / 603 = 2.19 (p < 0.01); SRMR = .04; RMSEA = .04; TLI = .93; CFI = .94. As Table 2 shows, convergent validity was established by showing all factor loadings were significant at the .001 level and all composite reliability (ρ_c) values were higher than .70. Finally, AVE values were higher than .50 except for the measures for genuine expression, reduced personal accomplishment and depersonalization, which were slightly less than .50. All the square-root values of AVE were higher than the corresponding correlations between the variable and associated variables, establishing discriminant validity (Hair et al., 2014).

Table 2.

Factor loadings, composite reliability, and AVE for study variables.

Variable	Item	β	ρ_c	AVE
SA	SA 1	.85	.91	.68
	SA 2	.87
	SA 3	.84
	SA 4	.80
	SA 5	.74
DA	DA 1	.67	.82	.61
	DA 2	.87
	DA 3	.78
GE	GE 1	.45	.72	.47
	GE 2	.81
	GE 3	.74
EE	EE 1	.81	.92	.55
	EE 2	.77
	EE 3	.82
	EE 4	.65
	EE 5	.86
	EE 6	.80
	EE 7	.64
	EE 8	.59
	EE 9	.71
DP	DP 1	.39	.75	.41
	DP 2	.83
	DP 3	.89
	DP 4	.49
	DP 5	.40
RA	RA 1*	.38	.80	.34
	RA 2*	.41
	RA 3*	.68
	RA 4*	.66
	RA 5*	.52
	RA 6*	.68
	RA 7*	.73
	RA 8*	.48
TI	TI 1	.85	.89	.67
	TI 2	.93
	TI 3	.70
	TI 4	.77

Note. * indicates a reverse-coded item.

Structural model analysis

SEM was conducted to test all the hypotheses in the theoretical model. The goodness-of-fit statistics indicated that the structural model showed a reasonable fit, χ² / df = 1391.26 / 605 = 2.30 (p < 0.01); SRMR = .05; RMSEA = .05; TLI = .93; CFI = .93. As shown in Figure 2, surface acting was positively associated with emotional exhaustion (β = .41; p < .01), depersonalization (β = .37; p < .01), and reduced personal accomplishment (β = .21; p < .01), whereas genuine expression was negatively associated with emotional exhaustion (β = –.14; p < .05), depersonalization (β = –.19; p < .01), and reduced personal accomplishment (β = –.30; p < .01). Deep acting was not associated with emotional exhaustion (β = –.04; p > .05) and depersonalization (β = –.06; p > .05), and negatively associated with reduced personal accomplishment only (β = –.17; p < .01). In addition, surface acting (β = .10; p > .05), deep acting (β = .01; p > .05), and genuine expression (β = –.02; p > .05) were not associated with turnover intention. Finally, turnover intention was positively associated with emotional exhaustion (β = .41; p < .01), depersonalization (β = .18; p < .01), and reduced personal accomplishment (β = .28; p < .01). The total standardized indirect effect between surface acting and turnover intention was .29, p < .001 (95% bias-corrected confidence interval: (.19, .40)), whereas the total standardized indirect effect between genuine expression and turnover intention was –.17, p < .01 (95% bias-corrected confidence interval: (–.30, –.07)).

Figure 2.

Final structural model. Values in parentheses represent the standardized indirect effects between emotional labor strategies and turnover intention. *p < .05, **p < .01

Discussion

The purposes of this study were to examine the relationships between the three emotional labor strategies, teacher burnout, and turnover intention. This study also examined the mediating role of teacher burnout in the relationships between emotional labor strategies and turnover intention. Most studies on PE teachers’ turnover intention have focused on the influence of demographic factors, organizational contexts, and employment options on turnover intention (Mäkelä et al., 2014b). This is the first study to examine how different emotional labor strategies influence turnover intention through burnout, an important mediator among PE teachers, thus indicating significant theoretical implications for PE literature.

The results showed that surface acting was positively associated with all the facets of teacher burnout among PE teachers. Based on COR theory, surface acting, which requires high levels of physiological effort, leads to a greater depletion of emotional resources, which in turn results in negative outcomes such as job burnout (Mahoney et al., 2011). Furthermore, Mauss et al. (2007) noted that deliberate emotional regulation produced an “ironic effect” (p. 699) of control; the individual may become angrier as they focus on their anger during the regulation process. This may be the mechanism for the negative impact of deliberate emotional regulation on PE teachers’ health. Therefore, we can conclude that surface acting is detrimental to PE teachers’ health, indicated by the positive relationship with teacher burnout.

It is worth noting that marginalization and isolation leads PE teachers to spend most of their time with students, which in turn increases the students’ influence on PE teachers (Schempp and Graber, 1992). Because of such an influence, PE teachers may feel pressure to meet students’ needs and to manage their emotions by presenting an idealized image of their emotions to students. Thus, it seems plausible to note that the unique characteristics of PE teaching (i.e. marginalization and isolation) lead PE teachers to experience more pressure to manage their emotions, which in turn leads them to engage in surface acting in their interactions with students.

Second, this study found that deep acting had a negative association with the reduced personal accomplishment dimension of teacher burnout only. The result indicates that when PE teachers use deep acting, they will be more likely to experience a feeling of personal accomplishment. According to Brotheridge and Lee (2002), deep acting could generate a feeling of authenticity by aligning felt emotions with expressed emotions. In addition, it could result in positive interactions between employees and clients because clients could also feel the expressers’ authenticity. Thus, it would lead to feelings of personal accomplishment as a form of self-evaluation through authenticity and positive feedback from clients (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002).

Genuine expression was found to be negatively associated with all the facets of teacher burnout. Mauss et al. (2007) noted that automatic emotional regulation, which involved the method of genuine expression, was effective and efficient because it typically required fewer resources and does not deplete emotional resources compared with deliberate emotional regulation. Furthermore, Mahoney et al. (2011) stated that as genuine expression resulted in positive interactions between expressers and recipients, the strategy replenished emotional resources and led to a net gain of resources and favorable outcomes. Hence, these underlying mechanisms of genuine expression may lead PE teachers to experience eustress. Therefore, based on COR, genuine expression, which requires a lesser investment of resources, will result in less teacher burnout than other emotional coping strategies.

Finally, it was found that teacher burnout fully mediated the relationship between surface acting and turnover intention. PE teachers who suppressed their negative emotions and faked positive emotional displays were more likely to experience burnout, which elicited an intention to leave the teaching profession. Thus, although previous literature has shown that teacher burnout predicts teacher turnover intention (Smith and Ingersoll, 2004; Spittle et al., 2015), this study found that it might in fact be surface acting that increased the level of teacher burnout (Chang, 2013), which in turn ultimately increased turnover intention.

“The inconsistent mediation model” (MacKinnon et al., 2007: 8) between genuine expression, teacher burnout, and turnover intention is more complex than the previous mediation model. The results indicate that genuine expression is negatively associated with teacher burnout, which is positively related to turnover intention. Thus, PE teachers with genuine expression will experience less burnout, which can influence the level of turnover intention. This indicates that PE teachers with more genuine expression will be more likely to have less turnover intention because they will have lower levels of teacher burnout. Thus, although it is inevitable that teacher burnout increases the level of turnover intention, this study shows that PE teachers can reduce their turnover intention by engaging in genuine expression.

Previous research has focused on the relationship between emotional labor and teacher burnout (Chang, 2013) or on the relationship between teacher burnout and turnover intention (Spittle et al., 2015); this study examined the relationships among these variables simultaneously. The results contribute to the existing knowledge by establishing teacher burnout as an important mediator in the process of engaging in emotional labor.

Practical implications

Interviews with novice PE teachers conducted by Shoval et al. (2010: 91) captured novice teachers’ typical descriptions of their response to emotional difficulties as “the need to put on a mask.” Some respondents stated, “I always try to appear calm, with a smile on my face” and “When I walk in through the school gate, I put on a happy face.” These quotes clearly demonstrate PE teachers’ tendencies to engage in surface acting. However, the findings of this study showed that surface acting was likely to lead to the negative consequences of teacher burnout and turnover intention. Therefore, PE teachers need to understand the negative consequences of their typical emotional regulation strategy and try to avoid them.

The finding that deep acting had no relationships with the two dimensions of teacher burnout (i.e. emotional exhaustion and depersonalization) and had a negative relationship with reduced personal accomplishment indicates that it is a better strategy to protect one’s well-being compared with surface acting. For PE teachers to engage in deep acting, Gross (2002) suggested that individuals who experienced emotional challenges should leave the place in which specific emotions were elicited before expressing them. Thus, PE teachers experiencing intense negative emotions might be tempted to instruct students to practice skills on their own and leave the teaching situation briefly to regain calmness. However, since leaving the classroom is not an option for teachers, the cognitive change strategy of deep acting (Gross, 2002) may be a better option. In this strategy, individuals strive to modify their emotions by changing their perception of given situations. For example, PE teachers confronting rude and disrespectful students can consider that the students might have problems at home that underlie their negative behaviors. This thought process may help teachers shift their anger into sympathetic feelings, which in turn prompts caring behaviors and thus fosters relationships that nurture the students’ growth and development. However, it is important to note that deep acting also consumes one’s inner resources, which can result in burnout (Brotheridge and Lee, 2002) because it involves a cognitive action to reappraise situations (Grandey and Gabriel, 2015). This leads to the conclusion that it is important for PE teachers to learn how to engage in genuine expression, because the results suggest that genuine expression reduces burnout and turnover intention.

Therefore, PE teacher educators should provide instructions for PE teachers to assist them in engaging in genuine expression. The extant literature agrees that unconscious emotional regulation can be learned through structured intervention programmes (Christou-Champi et al., 2015). For example, Christou-Champi et al. (2015) found that the emotional regulation process can become more efficient as instructors engage in specific training sessions. In the training sessions, participants in the reappraisal condition (i.e. deep acting condition) were exposed to a series of stimuli (e.g. pictures or video clips) that evoke negative emotions. Then, the participants were encouraged to reinterpret the contents of the stimuli to change their emotional experience. The results of their study showed that the training increased the efficiency of the deep acting strategy, as indicated by the decreased time required to regulate emotions and increased heart rate variability. More importantly, the study found that participants in the reappraisal condition could naturally regulate their emotions (i.e. genuine expression) two weeks later and reported being more habitual in their use of the reappraisal strategy. These findings indicate that structured practice can facilitate the automatic control of negative emotions and that these effects can be routinized beyond training (Christou-Champi et al., 2015).

Taken all together, Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programmes should consider teaching more effective and health-beneficial strategies of deep acting and genuine expression to foster teachers’ well-being through their curriculums. Specifically, PETE programmes need to be designed to help PE teachers understand (a) emotional labor, (b) the consequences of surface acting, deep acting, and genuine expression, and (c) how to engage in deep acting and genuine expression at schools. The role-playing exercise can be conducted to help PE teachers simulate incidents that require them to engage in emotional labor.

Limitations and future research directions

This study has several limitations. First, this is a cross-sectional study, and causal relationships cannot be inferred from the findings. Future research should implement longitudinal or experimental studies to establish causal relationships for analysis. In addition, the low response rate (23.4%) limits the study’s generalizability. Although a low response rate does not always indicate low response representativeness (Lambert and Miller, 2014), future studies need to investigate other methods to increase response rates. Furthermore, several questionnaires showed relatively low psychometric properties in terms of reliability and AVE scores. In future research, a pilot study may be conducted to establish strong psychometric properties before the actual survey.

Although this study has provided evidence that emotional labor and burnout influence turnover intention, moderators that might mitigate the negative consequences of surface acting and teacher burnout should be identified. Previous research has identified that social support from schools, colleagues, and administrators plays a critical role in retaining PE teachers (Mäkelä et al., 2014b). Organizational factors including social support, appropriate reward systems, and increased autonomy may moderate the significant relationships between surface acting, teacher burnout, and turnover intentions (Kinman et al., 2011).

In addition, as this study focused only on the individual outcomes among PE teachers, future studies should investigate how emotional labor strategies affect students’ outcomes. Through the emotional contagion process (Hatfield et al., 1993), PE teachers’ emotions may influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of students. Particularly, emotional deviance is a relevant construct in this respect in that PE teachers’ “out-of-bounds” emotional performance may result in negative impressions and reactions from students and schools, which in turn result in significant negative outcomes for students.

Finally, future research could usefully focus on novice PE teachers and their struggles with the emotional demands of their work and subsequent negative outcomes. Mäkelä et al. (2014a) found that a considerable number of PE teachers in Finland left their profession within 5 years. Teachers experience cultural shock and reality shock in terms of professional development and emotional experience (Armour and Yelling, 2004); they should be made aware of the realities of the teaching profession and receive assistance to develop emotional coping strategies.

Conclusion

The underlying motivations to investigate emotional labor were to help identify the important underlying mechanisms of PE teachers’ turnover intention and to provide new insights into the reasons that prompt these professionals to leave the profession.

PE teachers inevitably engage in the emotional labor process as a means of building an emotional connection with students and providing them multiple benefits (Stuhr et al., 2012). However, Shoval et al. (2010) found that PE teachers tended to perform surface acting in this process. This study provides a warning sign among those PE teachers, because the findings show that this process can negatively influence their well-being. Specifically, PE teachers who tended to suppress their negative emotions and show a fake outward emotional display were more likely to burn out and consider leaving their profession. To overcome this problem, this study urges such professionals to engage in deep acting (trying to change one’s inner feelings first and then express emotions) because there was no relationship between deep acting and teacher burnout. Finally, if PE teachers utilize genuine expression, their well-being will increase. Furthermore, school administrators and PETE programmes should consider ways to help PE teachers engage in more effective coping strategies of deep acting and genuine expression in a more efficient way to keep them in their professions and schools. The researcher suggests that this study can be the starting point to explore the emotional challenges derived from PE teaching and to encourage researchers to examine how these differences in emotional labor can affect teaching effectiveness.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank the editor and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments/inputs helped improve the quality of this manuscript.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a grant from University of North Alabama Research Committee.

Appendix 1

Variable	Measure/item
Surface acting	I put on an act in order to deal with students in an appropriate way
	I put on a “show” or “performance” when interacting with students
	I just pretend to have the emotion I need to display for my job
	I put on a “mask” in order to display the emotions I need for the job
	I fake the emotions I show when dealing with students
Deep acting	I try to actually experience the emotions that I must show to students
	I make an effort to actually feel the emotions that I need to display toward others
	I work hard to feel the emotions that I need to show to students
Genuine expression	The emotions I express to students are genuine
	The emotions I show students come naturally
	The emotions I show students match what I spontaneously feel
Turnover intention	It is likely I will actively look for a new job in the next year
	I often think about quitting teaching
	It would take very little change in my present circumstances to cause me to leave teaching
	There’s not too much to be gained by sticking with teaching indefinitely

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