Teacher smile your stress away! Emotional Labour, Stress, and Stress Management Techniques in the Eastern Galilee | Chapter 01 | Perspectives of Arts and Social Studies Vol. 1
Teaching is an emotional profession
that requires delicate balances. This study aims to explore the ways in which
teachers in the Eastern Galilee (Israel's northern periphery) cope with stress.
Our main purpose is to examine the links between teachers’ stress, its sources
and consequences, and stress management techniques and their positive or
negative effect on stress.
To reveal the associations between
these variables, we posited four main hypotheses: 1) there is a positive correlation
between stress and
the intensity of
negative emotions; 2)
there is a
negative correlation between the level of stress and the ability to cope
with it; 3) there is a negative correlation between the
intensity of negative
emotions and the
ability to cope
with stress; and
4) there is a
negative correlation between seniority and level of stress - that is, the more
senior a teacher is, the less stress he or she will feel. To test the above
hypotheses, we assessed emotional labour, negative emotion, and
stress management techniques
in a sample
of 100 teachers,
using validated self-reporting measures.
The main findings show the following:
1)There is a positive correlation
between teachers’ stress and the fact that they invest the majority of their
time, whether at school or at home, in fulfilling their work responsibilities.
Moreover, we found a very strong and significant positive correlation of
p‹0.0l, r=0.724, showing that the more a teacher experiences stress, the
stronger their negative emotions will be.
2)We
found a weak
negative correlation of p›0.05, r=0.142
between level of
stress and management techniques.
3)Over time, negative emotions can
affect the manner in which teachers cope with pressure. This is an
important point. Various
studies have shown
that as a
teacher's work becomes
more demanding, forcing the teacher to invest their internal emotional
resources in order to cope with complex
situations, feelings of
frustration and discomfort
increase, resulting in
a heightened sense of stress and
impaired functioning.
4)Seniority is a very important factor
in balancing levels of stress. We found that the more senior a teacher is, the
less stress they will experience. Teachers with seniority of one to five years
had the highest measure of stress (M=3.03, Std=0.77), whereas the measure of
stress among teachers with six to11 years of seniority (M=2.99, Std=0.53) or
those with more than 11 years' seniority (M=2.79, Std=0.63) was lower. This
important point fills gaps in research in the field which examines the relationship
between seniority and coping techniques.
Surprisingly, there
is a discrepancy
between the general
perception that teaching
is a very
busy profession with high levels of stress and reports of
average-reasonable levels of stress reported by the majority of teachers
participating in this study. This does not mean that the profession of teaching
does not produce high levels of stress.
However, new thinking may be required
to see teaching as a profession which relates to emotional work and, as such,
requires more emotional and social support as part of a broader professional
and organizational approach.
Author(s) Details
Dr. Yonit Nissim
Faculty of Education, Ohalo
College, Katzrin, Israel
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