Can Emotional Labor of Teachers Really Improve Teaching Effectiveness? A Study on Taiwanese Colleges

Abstract

Considering the emotional rule of the traditional Chinese culture and the decrease in the young population, the teachers in the Taiwanese colleges pay more and more attention to the role of emotional labor in the teaching job. The focus of this paper is to study whether the emotional labor of teachers can really improve the effectiveness of teaching. It has been proven that the invested emotional labor has a reverse U-shaped relationship with the teaching effectiveness overall; the “surface acting†of the emotional labor strategy does not have significant influence on teaching effeteness, while the “active deep acting†and “passive deep acting†has a positive impact. This implies that there is an appropriate degree of emotional labor that the teachers put in. And a high sense of professional self-identity is requested to tap the potential of emotional labor for improving teaching effectiveness.