Abstract
Existing research reveals the academic profession to be stressful and emotion-laden. Recent evidence further shows job-related stress and emotion regulation to impact faculty well-being and productivity. The present study recruited 414 Canadian faculty members from 13 English-speaking research-intensive universities. We examined the associations between perceived stressors, emotion regulation strategies, including reappraisal, suppression, adaptive upregulation of positive emotions, maladaptive downregulation of positive emotions, as well as adaptive and maladaptive downregulation of negative emotions, and well-being outcomes (emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, quitting intentions, psychological maladjustment, and illness symptoms). Additionally, the study explored the moderating role of stress, gender, and years of experience in the link between emotion regulation and well-being as well as the interactions between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in predicting well-being. The results revealed that cognitive reappraisal was a health-beneficial strategy, whereas suppression and maladaptive strategies for downregulating positive and negative emotions were detrimental. Strategies previously defined as adaptive for downregulating negative emotions and upregulating positive emotions did not significantly predict well-being. In contrast, strategies for downregulating negative emotions previously defined as dysfunctional showed the strongest maladaptive associations with ill health. Practical implications and directions for future research are also discussed.
Highlights
Over the last few decades, academic employment has changed drastically as higher education institutions worldwide have experienced rapid growth in student numbers, internationalization, commercialization, major educational reforms, and accountability
Years of experience was retained as a covariate as it correlated negatively with stress, emotion regulation strategies, exhaustion, as well as physical and psychological ill health, and was positively associated with suppression and job satisfaction
Faculty members experience emotion-laden interactions in their day-to-day work as they members indicates that stress and the emotional demands of academic life compromise the personal encounter a variety of emotional demands
Summary
Over the last few decades, academic employment has changed drastically as higher education institutions worldwide have experienced rapid growth in student numbers, internationalization, commercialization, major educational reforms, and accountability. Faculty are expected to demonstrate exceptional performance in instruction, research, service, and administration while resources have remained static or decreased (Biron et al 2008; McAlpine and Akerlind 2010; Ogbonna and Harris 2004; Rothmann and Barkhuizen 2008). Large-scale studies from around the globe consistently demonstrate that increased demands have contributed to alarmingly high levels of stress in post-secondary faculty (Biron et al 2008; Catano et al 2010; Kinman 2014; Tytherleigh et al 2005; Winefield et al 2003). The terms faculty, faculty members, post-secondary faculty, university teachers/professors/lecturers are used synonymously in the present paper.
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