Emotional labour and burnout among public middle school teachers in South Korea

The severity of teachers’ emotional labour and burnout has become more significant recently; however, only a limited number of researches have examined the relationship between emotional requirements and burnout of teachers. This study aims (1) to investigate the level of emotional labour, emotional consonance, and burnout among South Korean middle school teachers, and (2) to explore the relationship of burnout with emotional labour and emotional consonance. This study was conducted in a sample of 152 teachers, with two scales measuring emotional labour and burnout respectively: Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labour (D-QEL) and The Dutch Educators Survey (mbi-nl-es). The results indicate that South Korean teachers perform a high level of emotional labour; while they show low emotional consonance. They are also found to be highly burnt-out, particularly in emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Correlational analyses reveal that emotional exhaustion is significantly correlated with every dimension of emotional labour. Depersonalization has a positive, statistically significant correlation with surface acting and suppression. Multiple linear regression analyses suggest that among the dimensions of emotional labour, surface acting is the strongest predictor of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. However, no relationship is found between emotional labour and reduced personal accomplishment. In contrast, the key finding is that emotional consonance, the absence of emotional labour, is negatively correlated to every dimension of burnout. Moreover, emotional consonance contributes to the increase in personal accomplishment. This result suggests an approach from a different direction towards understanding emotional requirements for future research: the positive influences of emotional consonance