Abstract
Existing research suggests that numerous aspects of the modern academic career are stressful and trigger emotional responses, with evidence further showing job-related stress and emotions to impact well-being and productivity of post-secondary faculty (i.e., university or college research and teaching staff). The current paper provides a comprehensive and descriptive review of the empirical research on coping and emotion regulation strategies among faculty members, identifies adaptive stress management and emotion regulation strategies for coping with emotional demands of the academic profession, synthesizes findings on the association between such strategies and faculty well-being, and provides directions for future research on this topic.
Highlights
Not unlike other professionals, post-secondary faculty have consistently been found to report high levels of job-related stress (Winefield et al, 2003)
To address this research gap, the present paper reviewed the fragmented empirical literature pertaining to the strategies used by postsecondary faculty to cope with stress and regulate their emotions as organized according to the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998a; Gross, 1998b) and emotional labor theories (Hochschild, 1983; Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993; Grandey, 2000)
Published research has consistently established the link between greater emotional inauthenticity (i.e., surface-acting) and lower employee well-being, post-secondary faculty regularly perform this type of emotional labor as part of their emotion-related job expectations and their potential benefits for student development and learning
Summary
Post-secondary faculty (i.e., university or college research and teaching staff across ranks and tenure status) have consistently been found to report high levels of job-related stress (Winefield et al, 2003). A recent comparison of U.K. and Australian academics revealed that faculty suffered from higher levels of stress-related caseness (i.e., when some intervention is required) as compared with other university groups (e.g., post-secondary staff, support professonals; Kinman, 2014), with reported burnout by academics being comparable to that of school teachers and medical professionals for whom burnout levels are high (Watts and Robertson, 2012). Empirical evidence strongly supports the detrimental impact of stress on post-secondary faculty members’ physical (e.g., sleep problems, nausea, heart pounding) and psychological well-being (e.g., anxiety, depression, burnout, psychological distress)and professional competencies, as well as student attainment and institutional productivity (Blix et al, 1994; Stevenson and Harper, 2006; Catano et al, 2010; Watts and Robertson, 2012; Barkhuizen et al, 2014; Kataoka et al, 2014; Shen et al, 2014; Salimzadeh et al, 2017)
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