An investigation on Emotional Labor and Relevant Constructs among Chinese Preschool Teachers

Teaching is an endeavor of emotions, particularly for preschool teachers (Hargreaves, 2001; Zhang et al., 2020). As required by the social norms and display rules, teachers tend to experience a persistent disconnect between the emotions they experience and those they perform (Zembylas, 2005). As the performative aspect of emotion regulation, emotional labor reflects such discrepancy between experienced and expressed emotions which can impact teachers’ psychological, behavioral, and physical adjustment (e.g., Cheung & Lun, 2015; Qi et al., 2017). There is a gap in the literature pertaining to how emotional labor influence teaching performance and effectiveness (Xie et al., 2022; Yin et al., 2017). Based on Demerouti’s job demands-resources model, this study aims to examine emotional labor as a job demand and a series of relevant constructs including leadership and grit as job and personal resources, respectively, and to explore their individual and collective effects on teachers’ performance-related consequences such as teacher self-efficacy and teacher-child interactions.