Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 22, Issue 8, November 2006, Pages 1042-1054
Teaching and Teacher Education

Emotional intelligence and components of burnout among Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2006.04.005Get rights and content

Abstract

The relationships among four components of emotional intelligence (emotional appraisal, positive regulation, empathic sensitivity, and positive utilization) and three components of teacher burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment) were investigated in a sample of 167 Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. One hypothesized and five competing models were constructed and tested using structural equation modeling procedures. The hypothesized model provided an adequate and moderately good fit, suggesting that emotional exhaustion, influenced by emotional appraisal and positive regulation, was causally prior to depersonalization and personal accomplishment, but personal accomplishment could develop relatively independently from the burnout components through the influence of positive utilization of emotions. Implications of the findings on the articulation of components of emotional intelligence and burnout for preventive intervention efforts to combat burnout are discussed.

Introduction

Since the pioneering work of Kyriacou & Sutcliffe (1978a), Kyriacou & Sutcliffe (1978b), Kyriacou & Sutcliffe (1979), Kyriacou & Sutcliffe (1980), teacher stress has increasingly been recognized as a widespread problem in different educational settings (e.g., Boyle, Borg, Falzon, & Baglioni, 1995; Dick & Wagner, 2001; Kyriacou (1987), Kyriacou (1998), Kyriacou (2001)). In recent years, it has become a global concern, considering that about as many as a third of the teachers surveyed in various studies around the world reported that they regarded teaching as highly stressful (Borg, 1990). In identifying sources of teacher stress, different investigators in different settings have come up with a diversity of stressors that include students’ misbehaviors and discipline problems, students’ poor motivation for work, heavy workload and time pressure, role conflict and role ambiguity, conflicting staff relationships in school management and administration, and pressure and criticisms from parents and the wider community (see Dunham, 1992; Travers & Cooper, 1996). Interestingly, while these stressors are found to be quite common across settings in the teaching profession, teachers do not react uniformly to these common stressors (Milstein & Farkas, 1988). Specifically, some teachers might develop psychological symptoms of varying severity, ranging from mild frustration, anxiety, and irritability to emotional exhaustion as well as psychosomatic and depressive symptoms (e.g., Dunham, 1992; Farber (1984a), Farber (1984b); Kyriacou & Pratt, 1985; Kyriacou & Sutcliffe, 1978b; Schonfeld, 1992; Seidman & Zager, 1991). In this connection, teacher burnout has been used to refer to the more severe individual negative affective experience (see Bakker, Schaufeli, Sixma, & Bosveld, 2001; Maslach (1986), Maslach (1999)).

The phenomenon of burnout arising from intense interactions in working with people, however, is not uncommon, and has been studied in a variety of human service occupations, including health care and mental health care professionals, social welfare workers, lawyers, and business organization employees (e.g., Freudenberger, 1974; Golembiewski, Munzenrider, & Carter, 1983; Maslach & Jackson (1978), Maslach & Jackson (1982); Pines & Maslach, 1978; Raquepaw & Miller, 1989; Stevens & O’Neill, 1983). Maslach and Jackson (1986), in developing the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) for more systematic research, conceptualized burnout as encompassing three components of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion refers to the feelings of being emotionally drained by the intense contact with other people, depersonalization refers to the negative attitude or callous responses toward people; and reduced personal accomplishment refers to a decline in one's sense of competence and of successful achievement in working with people (Maslach, 1986; Maslach & Jackson, 1986). The extensive interest in studies of burnout in the teaching profession has also led to the development of a special version of MBI for teachers (MBI-Education Form; Maslach & Jackson, 1986), and an accumulating body of studies on teacher burnout in North America (e.g., Anderson & Iwanicki, 1984; Beck & Gargiulo, 1983; Belcastro, Gold, & Hays, 1983; Belcastro & Hays, 1984; Gold (1984), Gold (1985); Iwanicki, 1983; Iwanicki & Schwab, 1981; Schwab & Iwanicki, 1982) and around the world (e.g., Blasé, 1982; Capel (1987), Capel (1989); Chan & Hui, 1995; Kremer & Hofman, 1985; Mo, 1991).

There are good reasons for the increasing research interests on teacher burnout, as burnout might have serious consequences for teachers’ well being, their teaching careers, and the learning outcomes of their students. Specifically, teacher burnout might impair the quality of teaching, and might also lead to job dissatisfaction, work alienation, physical and emotional ill-health, and teachers’ leaving the profession (see Vandenberghe & Huberman, 1999). Thus, efforts in teacher education to help teachers manage work stress and prevent burnout should warrant support and investigations. However, before focusing on the development of preventive intervention efforts, it seems natural that one should raise the question as to why some teachers could be less vulnerable to burnout than others in the face of similar work stress. In this connection, an examination of personal resources in coping and managing one's affective experience appears relevant.

In recent decades, a consistent view has gradually emerged, indicating that individuals cannot be assumed to be equally skilled at perceiving, understanding, and utilizing emotional information, suggesting that individuals differ as to their abilities to exert effective control over their emotional lives (see Salovey, Bedell, Detweiler, & Mayer, 2000). Such individual differences are now more commonly conceptualized as differences in emotional intelligence (Salovey & Mayer, 1990). While the construct of emotional intelligence could be viewed somewhat differently, as a spectrum of abilities, or abilities and personality characteristics by different researchers and practitioners (see Ciarrochi, Chan, & Caputi, 2000; Goleman, 1995; Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso (2000a), Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso (2000b)), it is generally accepted that the construct of emotional intelligence could provide a useful framework that allows the identification of specific skills needed to understand and experience emotions most adaptively. Thus, this framework might also have particular relevance in the study of teacher burnout.

Specifically, Mayer and Salovey (1997) have defined emotional intelligence by the specific competencies it encompasses, organizing skills in perceiving emotions, facilitating thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions. Thus, it could be conjectured that the integrated operation of these emotional competencies might render teachers less vulnerable to teacher burnout. In other words, teachers less vulnerable to teacher burnout might be those with enhanced emotional intelligence, and they might gain better access to the healthy information and action tendency within emotions, and use the information to make sense of their reactions to stressors as well as to guide adaptive action (see Greenberg, 2002). Indeed, research studies have demonstrated that emotional intelligence could help foster effective coping with past events and traumatic experiences (e.g., Nolen-Hoeksema, McBride, & Larson, 1997; Pennebaker, 1997), with anticipation of desired goals in the future (e.g., Taylor, Pham, Rivkin, & Armor, 1998), and with current events and chronic stress (e.g., Folkman & Moskowitz (2000a), Folkman & Moskowitz (2000b)).

To assess individuals’ emotional intelligence, Schutte and her colleagues developed a 33-item self-report Emotional Intelligence Scale (EIS; Schutte et al., 1998) based on the Mayer–Salovey model of emotional intelligence. In studies related to the instrument's development, they have also demonstrated the sound psychometric properties of the measure, including its reliability and validity. While their findings suggested that the scale could be conceptualized as a unidimensional scale of emotional intelligence, other studies have distinguished factors that were related to trait emotional intelligence and information-processing emotional intelligence (e.g., Petrides & Furnham, 2000). In assessing emotional intelligence of Chinese secondary schoolteachers using EIS, Chan (2004) has identified four components of emotional intelligence labeled as emotional appraisal, positive regulation, empathic sensitivity, and positive utilization. It is of great interest to explore the relationships among these four components of emotional intelligence and the three components of burnout. In addition to exploring how components of emotional intelligence could be conceptualized as antecedents of the three burnout components, the articulation of the interrelationships among the three burnout components needs to be further explored. In this regard, Byrne (1999) suggested that the three components of burnout should be modeled as separate constructs, as each might play specific role in the process or development of burnout. Specifically, Byrne (1999) concluded after reviewing her studies on various teacher groups that emotional exhaustion could be the key element with a significant impact on depersonalization, which in turn, might have a moderate negative influence on perceptions of personal accomplishment. Maslach (1999), however, also suggested that personal accomplishment might develop separately from emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. With this view, it could be hypothesized that emotional exhaustion might occur first and could be linked sequentially to depersonalization that could in turn impact on personal accomplishment. Alternatively, personal accomplishment could be hypothesized to develop relatively independently of the two components. Both hypotheses need to be carefully tested.

In recent years, the Hong Kong educational system has come under attack and criticism, propelling waves of education reform proposals and subsequent implementation (see Education Commission, 2000). Inevitably, teachers are pressed to do more work with no additional or even fewer resources while receiving fewer rewards and less recognition for their efforts. On the other hand, teachers are also blamed for the increasing occurrence of severe behavioral problems of students as well as the declining academic standards and achievement among students in primary and secondary schools (see Chan, 2000). Worse still, teachers’ competencies are questioned, as teachers are faced with the revised certification requirements and the need to pass new benchmarking examinations to become language teachers (see Education Commission, 1995). Working under conditions of increased work stress and reduced professional satisfaction, teachers naturally might have a sense of inconsequentiality that could lead to burnout (Farber, 1999). Thus, the topic of teacher stress and burnout has received increasing research attention in Hong Kong, as evidenced by the increasing number of studies addressing teacher dissatisfaction and turnover (Wong, 1989; Wong & Li, 1995), stressors in teaching and school guidance (Chan, 1998; Chan & Hui, 1998; Hui & Chan, 1996), and teacher burnout (Chan, 2003; Chan & Hui, 1995; Mo, 1991).

Along these lines, this study aimed to build on past studies and expand the body of findings on teachers’ perceived emotional intelligence and burnout through exploring the relationships among components of emotional intelligence and components of burnout in a sample of Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. Specifically, based on past findings, structural equation modeling was employed to test the model that hypothesized the pattern of relationships between specific components of emotional intelligence and specific components of burnout. For comparison, other competing models specifying alternative but plausible relationships among components of emotional intelligence and burnout were also tested.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

Secondary school teachers who enrolled in the author's courses in guidance and counseling for in-service training at the Chinese University of Hong Kong were solicited to participate voluntarily in this study. These teachers were requested to complete anonymously a brief questionnaire that included two abbreviated scales to assess teachers’ perceived emotional intelligence and burnout together with some basic demographic information. A total of 169 teachers returned completed questionnaires.

Results

The relevant item responses of the teachers to EIS-12 and MBI-9 were first tabulated and scored on four subscales of emotional intelligence and three subscales of teacher burnout. Table 1 shows the subscale means and standard deviations when relevant items were scored to yield scores on the four emotional intelligence components of emotional appraisal, positive regulation, empathic sensitivity, and positive utilization, and the three burnout components of emotional exhaustion,

Discussion

The present results expanded past findings on the components of emotional intelligence and burnout, and extended them to the articulation of the relationships of these constructs among Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong. In recent years, teachers in Hong Kong have increasingly found teaching to be more and more stressful due to the additional workload on implementing various reform measures. Some of these teachers, when interviewed, also suggested that job stress had eroded their

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