Emotional Labour And Work Withdrawal Among Early Childhood Teachers:A Comparative Study Between Ghana And China

Early childhood teacher(ECT)is an important guarantor for the development of early childhood education(ECE).The quality of these teachers,to a large extent,shapes the future development direction of the children under the care and education,especially healthy development,academic preparation and social emotional development.A key determinant of teacher quality at any level,especially in ECE,is teacher job status,engagement status,and professional loyalty,and the factors that influence these status are extremely complex.Existing literature has found that work withdrawal behaviour is common in ECT in low-and middle-income countries(LMICs),which is manifested in teacher absent from school,lateness(i.e.,miss several minutes/hours of work when show up),perfunctoriness(working with less effort),lack of work enthusiasm,burnout associated with emotional labour characteristics.From a realistic perspective,the author’s work experience in Ghana and part of the kindergarten observation experience in China,teachers are often occupied by matters unrelated to teaching or caring,and their work is in a superficial coping state.Research has found that these withdrawal behaviours are harmful not only to the children in teachers’ care,but also to greater social development,with negative job behaviours invoked by employees’ affective states and burnout.According to the work resource model,negative behaviours are unlikely to occur when one feels positive about the present or summons the right strategy for emotional management,inspiring an optimistic outlook on the future.However,individuals feeling overextended at work and/or with persistent negative emotions are discovered to enact behaviours that may be insidious to self and others.In the literature on teachers’ emotional labour and other service work,scholars have found that emotional labour strategies are the precursor of emotional state and other undesirable occupational phenomena,especially job burnout.Emotional labour(i.e.,managing and/or suppressing felt emotion)is a significant feature of ECT work.ECT work requires stable,continuous,positive,adjustable and empathic emotional states,but in reality,it is difficult for teachers to have enough personal and organizational resources to support their emotional pay and emotional compensation.In the face of insufficient resource support,ECT in low-and middle-income countries may adopt low-level emotion management strategies to induce negative emotional states and negative extension of emotions,thus leading to withdrawal from work.Despite the high cost of positive emotional labour,effective support has the potential to maintain and improve teachers’ well-being,quality of interaction and sense of personal accomplishment,and eliminate negative work behaviours.Because mature research on emotional labour and its relationship to well-being and job withdrawal is concentrated in Western countries,there is little focus on developing countries,especially in sub-Saharan Africa(SSA)and Southeast Asia(SEA).Specifically,ECTs’ behavioural responses such as lateness,absenteeism and cyberloafing to emotional labour,and stratified random sampling method in cross-cultural studies are yet to be reported.In this regard,the overall goal of this study is to:(1)Explore how emotional labour affects teachers’ work withdrawal behaviour in middle-income countries.(2)How burnout and emotional state affect ECT work withdrawal,and provide multiple possibilities for intervention.(3)To explore the moderating effect of social support from SSA and SEA in two countries.(4)Verify and expand the explanatory power of the conservation of resources model(COR)in the ECT emotional labour process,especially the explanatory power of the acquisition effect and buffer effect of surface resources and deep resources.The sample structure for the study consisted of rural and urban population distribution and school types from China and Ghana.Consent was duly sought from the appropriate authorities,and from the teachers graciously spent their time taking to participate in the study.Data collection was guided by a well-designed questionnaire,and data analyses were performed with a structural equation model(SEM).A final sample size of 679 from China and 574 from Ghana were used for the study.Study 1: Quantitative analysis of emotional labour and work withdrawal of ECT in two countries.Using exploratory factor analysis(EFA),confirmatory factor analysis(CFA),invariant analysis,and cross-validation on the basis of(a)items holding theoretical significance,(b)obtained minimum loadings of(EFA=.40 and CFA=.50 or greater),(c)items that failed the minimum requirement(below the threshold)and cross-loaded were dropped,and(d)intercepts of non-invariant items were freely estimated across groups(during latent mean comparison)the study constructs were validated between China and Ghana.The results revealed that emotional labour,affective state,burnout,social support,and work withdrawal constructs measure the same for Chinese and Ghanaian contexts and met the internal consistency,discriminant,and convergent validity.Study 2: Analysis on the correlative factors affecting the characteristics of ECT emotional labour and job exploration in two countries.multi-group confirmatory factor analyses(MGCFA)and latent mean comparison were employed to examine the similarities and differences between teachers’ culture,personal,and work characteristics.The research results demonstrated that surface acting significantly differs between Chinese and Ghanaian,male and female,and public and private school ECTs.Further,Ghanaian teachers significantly had a higher mean on depersonalization from people and work duties than Chinese teachers.In addition,gender difference was established in emotional labour,affective state,burnout,and work withdrawal.Study 3: Analysis of various mediating and regulating mechanisms of the relationships between ECT emotional labour characteristics and work withdrawal.First,the structural equation model(SEM)was conducted to explore the relationship between emotional labour and teacher psychological burnout: the mediating effect of affective states and moderating role of social support.The results indicated that surface acting depletes teachers’ resources to engender burnout(i.e.,emotional exhaustion and depersonalization)and these relations were significantly stronger in Chinese than Ghanaian context,whilst the association between deep acting and personal accomplishment was non-significantly different signifying the importance of resource conservation/gain to teacher efficacy in both cultures.Further,positive and negative affect mediated surface acting and emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment links in Chinese sample whereas mediated surface acting and personal accomplishment in Ghanaian sample.Also,the indirect relationship between deep acting and personal accomplishment via positive affect was stronger among Chinese teachers than among Ghanaian teachers.Social support serves as essential maintenance mechanism in the relationship between surface acting and emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment in Chinese sample.Second,the structural equation model(SEM)was conducted to examine the relationship between emotional labour and work withdrawal: the mediating role of burnout and affective states and the moderating role of social support.The research results revealed that surface acting predicted work withdrawal positively whilst deep acting related negatively to them in both China and Ghana samples.Deep acting diminishes work withdrawals because of its capacity to prevent emotional exhaustion and increase personal accomplishment,and the mediation role of emotional exhaustion in surface acting and work withdrawal links was significant in only China sample.Again,positive and negative affect partially or fully mediated surface acting and deep acting and work withdrawal links.Finally,social support serves as a resource element that offsets the negative effect of emotional labour on well-being(emotional exhaustion)in Ghana sample.Further,social support fosters the positive effect of emotional labour on positive affect to reduce work withdrawal in China sample.Because emotional labour forms salient determiner of ECTs’ well-being and work behaviour as well as educational outcomes;(1)it is important for education programmes for pre-and inservice teacher to focus on teacher’s emotional demand to address the emotionality’s in the ECE setting.(2)Management and headteachers in both cultures should organize periodic seminars to train both novice and experienced teachers and create awareness on different forms of emotional labour strategies,advantages and disadvantages associated with various strategies.(3)Supervisors and managers in both cultures should create a work culture that encourages cohesion and support within groups,allow sick work leave,and life adjustment for health benefits,as well as opportunity for professional development.The innovation of the study is the development of a theoretical model that draw from COR theory to elucidate resource drift in emotional labour processes that hold significance in psychological well-being,quality of interaction,and organizational citizenship behaviour among Ghanaian and Chinese ECTs.Highlights the criticality of teachers’ capacity to invest cognitive and emotional resources to effectively meet emotional demands as well as emphasizing the social resource flow to aid teachers to conserve and supplement resource loss in emotional labour process.