Kwok Kuen Tsang
Education researchers have investigated the phenomenon of emotional labor of teaching. These researchers tend to assume that teaching is similar to other occupations in service section that require employees to manage their emotions and emotional display for profile making. Therefore, teachers should perform emotional labor. Theoretically, performing emotional labor will generate emotional dissonance. In this sense, if teaching involves emotional labor, teaching should be per se unpleasant, frustrating, and even alienating. However, many studies found that emotional labor of teaching would bring desirable outcomes to teachers, such as: increase in job satisfaction, commitment, self-esteem, and work effectiveness. This article argues that the contradictory findings would be caused by the misconceptions and misinterpretations of the concept of emotional labor.
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