The interplay between job demands and emotional regulation of secondary school teachers and their relationship to teacher wellbeing at South African schools.

Abstract

Teacher well-being is the focus of research (Dreer, 2023) because of concerns about how to retain teachers when teacher attrition rates are high (Billingsley & Bettini, 2019) and because teachers who are well are considered to provide high-quality teaching (Monk, 2007). Teachers’ job demands play a role in teacher well-being (Dreer, 2023). Especially in South African schools, many teachers report high levels of job demands and lack of job resources (Naidoo-Chetty & Du Plessis, 2021). Teachers often report that emotional aspects of their profession are especially demanding (Frenzel et al., 2016), and how they regulate emotions as part of their profession is thus of great concern. Prior studies could show that emotion regulation strategies are relevant to teacher well-being (Fried et al., 2015). However, it is not yet established how the level and variety of teacher job demands and their choice of emotion regulation strategies interact and influence their well-being. It might also be possible that teachers who experience high levels and a wide variety of job demands may choose certain emotion regulation strategies or even struggle to regulate their emotions professionally. Thus, the study aimed to investigate the interplay of teachers’ job demands, emotional regulation, and the degree to which the interplay impacted the teacher’s well-being. The study also sought to examine why teachers reach a stage where they struggle to regulate their emotions. The study is underpinned by the Hot/Cool (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), the Resource/Strength (Baumeister et al., 1998), and the Job Demands Resources (Bakker & Demerouti, 2006) models. Informed by the pragmatist research paradigm, the study adopted a mixed methods research design in which (in the first phase) data was collected from a purposive sample of secondary school teachers in the Umlazi and Pinetown districts of Durban in the Republic of South Africa via selfadministered questionnaires. In the second phase, data were generated with a purposively recruited sample of nine teachers from the same areas, and semi-structured interviews were used. Data collected through the self-administered questionnaires were analysed using descriptive, inferential and multivariate statistics (hierarchical regressions, testing for interactions with the PROCESS macro, (Hayes, 2013) conducted in SPSS 28 (IBM Corp., 2021). Inductive content analysis was employed for the qualitative phase using MAXQDA (Version 2020) through emerging themes to analyse data from the semi-structured interviews. The findings of this study revealed that teachers in the two districts experienced high levels of job demands for disruptive learners, hiding emotions and frequency of emotions. The study showed that teachers in the sample mostly used emotional reappraisal, emotional suppression and deep acting instead of surface acting when regulating their emotions. One significant contribution of this study was to aggregate teacher job demands into the level and variety. The result of the analysis to determine how the new variable of level and variety of job demands affected teacher well-being showed a complex but exciting interplay of outcomes.