THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BURNOUT AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AMONG PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS IN BEIRUT

Teacher stress has increasingly been recognized as a widespread problem in different educational settings, but, while stressors are quite common across settings in the teaching profession, teachers react differently. In this connection, teacher burnout has been used to refer to the more severe individual negative affective experience. 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. As teacher burnout might impair the quality of teaching, and might also lead to job dissatisfaction, the question as to why some teachers could be less vulnerable to burnout than others calls for an examination of personal resources in coping and managing one's affective experience, differences now more commonly conceptualized as differences in emotional resources. 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. The present study, therefore, aimed at exploring the current personal emotional status of 114 private and public school teachers in Beirut District, Lebanon by measuring the level of their burnout and emotional intelligence. It also intended to find out whether there does exist a relationship between both. The sample consisted of 25 schools in the Beirut District (15 private schools and 10 public schools), and participants filled Maslach Burnout Inventory and Baron Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire in addition to a questionnaire identifying some demographic variables such as age, gender, and school type. Results showed that that the majority of teachers are burnt-out, and that there is a negative correlation between the level of burnout and emotional intelligence.