Exploring Faculty Emotions, Emotional Labor, and Teaching in Higher Education: A Mixed-Method Approach

This project looked at faculty accounts of emotional experiences in the workplace. Specifically, this project examined how faculty in higher education spoke about emotions and teaching, the ways emotional labor manifested itself in higher education faculty, and the relationship between emotions and the environment. Participants (n = 90) were college faculty from a large, research focused university. With over 35 different emotions shared during the focus groups, it was clear that faculty in higher education experience teaching from an emotional perspective. Even though many faculty in the interviews shared that they experienced the emotional labor of surface and deep acting, the effects of emotional labor (e.g. burnout) were lessened because acting served a purpose by contributing to students’ educational experiences. However, in the interviews, female faculty shared that they experienced frequent interactions with students that required them to engage in emotional labor either due to the nature of the students’ stories or because of the students’ problematic behavior. Finally, survey results showed many gender differences. For example, female faculty, compared to male faculty, were more anxious about saying something wrong while teaching, they desired more clarity of job expectations and standards for success, and they wanted more transparency within the review process. Additionally, female faculty shared that they viewed their departments as less supportive and that working with colleagues was more challenging than male faculty in this study. Finally, female faculty shared that it was more difficult for them to balance teaching, research, and service work responsibilities than male faculty