Leading Teachers' Emotions Like Parents: Relationships Between Paternalistic Leadership, Emotional Labor and Teacher Commitment in China.

Xin Zheng,Yuan Liu,Xiao Shi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00519

Abstract

Emotional labor plays an essential role in school leadership and teaching, as principals and teachers undergo complex interactions with students, colleagues, and parents. Although researchers have realized the influence of leaders’ behaviors on followers’ emotions in management and educational contexts, the relationship between leadership behaviors, teachers’ emotional labor, and related organizational outcomes has been underexplored. As leadership and emotional labor are situated and influenced by cultural contexts, the current study focused on the relationship between teachers’ emotional labor strategies, multidimensional teacher commitment, and paternalistic leadership, a unique leadership type rooted in Confucianism. Paternalistic leadership is a style that combines strong authority with fatherly benevolence, which is prevalent in East Asia and the Middle East. A sample of 419 teachers was randomly selected to participate in a survey. The results showed that principals’ authoritarian leadership behaviors had negative influences on teachers’ commitment to the profession and commitment to the school. Benevolent leadership had positive effects on teachers’ commitment to students, commitment to the profession, and commitment to the school. Teachers’ deep acting played positive mediating effects, while surface acting was a negative mediator. The results imply that school leaders could properly exert parent-like leadership practices to facilitate teacher commitment through managing teachers’ emotions.

Highlights

Emotional labor plays an essential role in school leadership and teaching, as principals and teachers undergo complex interactions with students, colleagues, and parents
Following the suggestion that future research should explore the relationship between emotional labor strategies, leadership styles and followers’ well-being, work attitudes, and job performance in various contexts (Hülsheger and Schewe, 2011; Berkovich and Eyal, 2015), this study explored the effects of paternalistic leadership (PL) on teachers’ emotional labor and organizational outcomes
The current study aims to explore the relationship between PL, emotional labor, and teacher commitment in a Chinese school context, with a particular focus on the mediating role of emotional labor strategies

Summary

Introduction

Emotional labor plays an essential role in school leadership and teaching, as principals and teachers undergo complex interactions with students, colleagues, and parents. Surface acting refers to Paternalistic Leadership and Teacher Emotion the strategy by which employees modify their emotional expression to comply with organizational rules, while deep acting means the process of changing one’s internal feelings to display the required emotional expression by using some cognitive techniques (Brotheridge and Lee, 2003; Grandey, 2003). As employees perform emotional labor to meet organizational rules specific to their roles (Hochschild, 1983; Brotheridge and Lee, 2003), teachers may perform different emotional labor strategies when they interact with students and principals. A lack of studies in management (Grandey and Melloy, 2017) and educational field (Uitto et al, 2015; Berkovich and Eyal, 2017) has explored the effect of leadership practices on followers’ emotional labor. As Grandey and Melloy’s (2017, p. 417) recent review pointed out, “surprisingly little research has explored specific managerial practices and their effects on emotional labor and outcomes.”

Methods

Results

Conclusion