Effects of University Teachers’ Emotional Labor on their Well-Being and Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Excellent teachers who provide excellent educational quality educate students with both skills and virtues. Teachers face various emotional problems; they not only work with labor, intellect, and affection, but also have to show appropriate emotions under increasing pressure to create a rational and warm organizational climate in schools. Teachers’ hard work is the emotional labor load. The university teachers in Bangkok, Thailand participated in this study. A total of 480 copies of the questionnaire were distributed. After removing invalid and incomplete ones, 437 copies were remained valid, with a response rate of 91%. The research results showed that a university that fails to meet the teachers’ satisfaction and expectations can result in teachers’ low well-being and job satisfaction as well as teaching inefficiency which seriously lowers the effectiveness of the university and university teachers are medium and high emotional labor workers who consume large amount of emotion and labor in their workplaces, therefore, they can easily show burnout, teaching apathy, and even physical and mental exhaustion under excessive use of emotions, and 3. a university leader who is willing to find a solution to the teachers’ emotional labor load can help them correctly manage their emotions to obtain a high level of well-being and job satisfaction. According to the results it can be discussed that the current study is expected to help in terms of increasing the number of emotion management courses and channels for releasing teachers’ emotional labor load, avoiding emotional dissonance, and promoting teacher efficiency.