Emotional Labor Strategies Of Middle School Teachers In Multi-ethnic Areas And Their Multiple Psychological Effects

At present,the rapid development of service-oriented economy has changed the way people work.It compressed people’s working space(gathered in office buildings,office room,hospitals,schools,and other dense places)and enhanced the interpersonal interaction and emotional communication between people.Therefore,emotional problems in organizations have attracted much attention in recent years,many scholars consequently devoted substantial effort to explore the role of emotions in specific work situations.One of the important research topics is emotional labor.Employees not only need to earnestly complete their own routine work,but also take managing their own emotions and influencing others’ emotions as part of their work,which is called emotional labor.Previous studies have showed that emotional labor can be viewed as an effective and important indicator to predict employees’ and organizational performance.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct in-depth and detailed research on the status and characteristics of emotional labor as well as its influences on individual’s performance and well-being in different occupational fields.This thesis focused on the educational background of multi-cultural integration,and systematically discussed the emotional labor of middle school teachers from multiethnic region.According to the resource conservation theory,the paper explored status quo and characteristics as well as multiple effects of emotional labor,and consequently attempted to provide valuable suggestions and guidances for optimizing teachers’ professional skills,enhancing teachers’ teaching efficacy,and improving teachers’ occupational well-being.At the same time,this research also made unique theoretical contribution and practical significance for stabilizing the teaching staff meanwhile it also helps to maintain social harmony and stability in the new period of social development in China.This article systemically discussed and analyzed emotional labor of middle school teachers in multi-ethnic region through four studies:Study 1,which consisted of three sub-studies and aimed to mainly explore the status quo and characteristics of emotional labor.Sub-study 1 was aimed to test the measurement invariance of teachers’ emotional labor scale across ethnics.Sub-study 2 was based on variable-center perspective and compared the differences of emotional labor strategies usage among some major demographic variables.Sub-study 3 was based on individual-center perspective and adopt the latent profile analysis(LPA)technique to explore whether there were some different sub-groups of teachers who showed different combinations of emotional labor strategies(surface acting,deep acting,and natural acting).Study 2,according to the emotional regulation model of Grandey and Melloy(2017)and through conditional process analysis of the structural equation model,it aimed to explore the relationship mechanism and influencing paths among work value,emotional labor strategies,job engagement and well-being indicators of middle school teachers.Study 3,behavioral experiments were used to explore the effects of different emotional labor strategies on teachers’ cognitive effectiveness.The core purpose was to investigate whether the process of employing different emotional labor strategies would take up different amount of resources and have differentiated impacts on their cognitive performance.Study 4,using multi-level linear model with nested data,aimed to explore the crosslevel effect of teachers’ emotional labor on students’ academic emotion and academic engagement.In summary,the main conclusions of four studies were as follows:(1)The emotional labor of middle school teachers in multi-ethnic region showed the same measurement structure and psychological content.(2)The using situation of teachers’ three emotional labor strategies in multi-ethnic region was as follows:natural acting strategy was the most commonly used,followed by deep acting,and surface acting was less frequently used.Minority teachers were significantly higher than Han teachers in the using of these three strategies.The score of surface acting used by male teachers was significantly higher than that of female teachers.With the increase of age or teaching experience,the level of teachers’ performing with the three strategies is constantly improving.(3)There were four latent profiles in the use of emotional labor strategies by middle school teachers from multi-ethnic region:high emotional labor group(22%),moderate emotional labor group(64%),low emotional labor group(6%),and natural sincerity group(8%),and these four latent profiles of teachers had significant differences in the level of occupational well-being:the natural sincere group was the highest,the lowemotion labor group was the lowest,and the other two groups were in the middle.(4)Work value had a significant predictive effect on the deep and natural acting,but not on the surface acting.These three emotional labor strategies had different psychological effects on the indicators of teachers’ occupational well-being.Deep acting and natural acting,respectively,partially mediated the relationships between work value and different occupational well-being indicators.Deep acting and natural acting,with job involvement respectively,played chain mediating roles in the relationships between teachers’ work value and well-being indicators.(5)Compared with the deep and natural acting,the process of surface acting consumed more physical and mental resources,meanwhile,surface acting had greater interference effect on cognitive performance of teachers.Natural acting would also consume certain resources,and the difference with deep acting in resource consumption was not significant.(6)Surface acting and natural acting of teachers’ emotional labor could significantly and negatively predict students’ academic engagement.While deep acting could significantly and positively predict students’ academic engagement.