Dispositional Affectivity, Emotional Labor and Teacher Self-Efficacy: A Longitudinal Analysis

In order to serve their roles properly and to meet emotional display rules of teaching profession, teachers perform emotional labor on a daily basis when teaching and interacting with students. Even though previous research has undoubtedly indicated that emotional labor can be harmful for teacher well-being, not much is known on its relationship with teacher self- efficacy - a motivational construct that is believed to strongly shape teachers’ instructional activities and their students’ academic outcomes. Moreover, the existing empirical findings on the role of teacher personality variables in explaining emotional labor and/or self-efficacy are still scarce. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine whether teacher emotional labor strategies (i.e., deep acting, hiding feelings and faking emotions) and self-efficacy are concurrently and reciprocally related to each other and whether teacher dispositional affectivity (i.e., positive affectivity and negative affectivity) can predict the use of certain emotional labor strategy and teacher efficacy beliefs. An initial sample of 3002 Croatian teachers (82% female) with varying years of teaching experiences (M=5.28, SD=10.50) participated in a longitudinal study with three time points (with approximately six months lags). Teachers gave self-reports on their dispositional affectivity at Time 1 and on their efficacy beliefs and use of emotional labor strategies at Time 2 and Time 3. An autoregressive cross-lagged analysis shown that emotional labor strategies and teacher self- efficacy are associated with each other both concurrently (i.e., self-efficacy is positively related to deep acting and negatively to hiding feelings and faking emotions at second and third time point) and reciprocally across time (i.e., self-efficacy assessed at Time 2 positively predicted deep acting and negatively hiding feelings assessed at Time 3, while self- efficacy assessed at Time 3 was positively predicted by deep acting and negatively by hiding feelings assessed at Time 2). In addition, positive affectivity positively predicted deep acting and self-efficacy over time, while negative affectivity positively predicted hiding feelings and faking emotions. The results of this study highlight the dynamic nature of teachers’ emotional and motivational processes as well as the prominent role of teachers’ stable personality characteristics in understanding these dynamics.