Teacher dispositional affectivity, emotional labor, and self-efficacy: A longitudinal analysis

The aim of the study was to test the longitudinal reciprocal relationship between teachers’ emotional labor strategies (i.e., deep acting, hiding emotions, and faking emotions) and teachers’ self-efficacy (TSE). Additionally, due to a scarcity of the empirical research on teachers’ stable individual differences that can explain teachers’ emotion regulation and motivation, the role of teachers’ dispositional affectivity (i.e., positive affectivity – PA and negative affectivity – NA) in predicting individual differences in teachers’ use of emotional labor strategies and TSE was examined. A large sample of 3010 Croatian teachers (82% female) with varying years of teaching experiences (M = 15.28, SD = 10.50) participated in a three-wave longitudinal study. The results showed that TSE and hiding emotions were reciprocally related to each other even after controlling for dispositional affectivity – hiding emotions at Time 2 was related to lower levels of TSE at Time 3 and vice versa. Next, PA positively predicted TSE at both Time 2 and Time 3, but negatively hiding and faking emotions at Time 2. In addition, PA positively predicted deep acting only at Time 2. In contrast, NA positively predicted surface acting at Time 2 and Time 3, and negatively TSE, but only at Time 1.