Managing Teachers' Job Attitudes: The Potential Benefits of Being a Happy and Emotional Intelligent Teacher

Abstract

According to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, the frequency of positive emotions is associated with the development of positive attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors in organizational contexts. However, positive and negative attitudes at work might also be influenced by different personal and job resources. While emotional intelligence has been significantly associated with positive job attitudes and personal well-being, no studies have yet examined the joint role of teacher happiness and emotional intelligence in key teacher job attitudes. The present study assesses whether emotional intelligence interacts with levels of teacher happiness to jointly explain important teacher job attitudes (i.e., job satisfaction and turnover intention). A total sample of 685 teaching professionals (431 female) filled out a battery of scales including subjective happiness, emotional intelligence, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Our results revealed that subjective happiness was significantly associated with both higher job satisfaction and lower turnover intention. Likewise, emotional intelligence was positively related to happiness and job satisfaction, and negatively related to turnover intention. Finally, interaction analysis showed the main effects of happiness and emotional intelligence in explaining teacher job attitudes. Beyond the main effects, the interaction effects of happiness and emotional intelligence were significant in predicting all teachers' job attitude indicators, even controlling for the effects of their sociodemographic variables. This work expands our knowledge about the role of teachers' positive emotions in the development of positive work attitudes, and also supports the inclusion of emotional skills in future teacher preparation programs as resources to facilitate work-related well-being.

Teachers’ Subjective Happiness: Testing the Importance of Emotional Intelligence Facets Beyond Perceived Stress

“…In the first step, age, gender, teaching level, teaching experience and contractual status were entered as covariates. As prior studies have found that several sociodemographic and work-related variables potentially explain differences in subjective well-being, 21 , 23 , 35 these variables were included in regression analyses to avoid confounding effects. In the second step, the score in perceived stress was entered, and in the third step, scores in the four EI dimensions were entered.…”

“…13,19 In this regard, there are studies reporting positive associations between EI and happiness both in occupational 20 and teacher samples. 21 Despite recent studies linking EI with subjective well-being indicators, including happiness, a primary limitation of existing findings relates to a lack of facet-level specificity. According to the ability model, EI is a construct comprised of EI facets hierarchically organized from the more basic processes at the lower levels (ie, perceiving emotions) to the more advanced processes at the higher levels (ie, regulating emotions).…”

“…13 , 19 In this regard, there are studies reporting positive associations between EI and happiness both in occupational 20 and teacher samples. 21 …”

Effective Personality as a Protective Factor in Teachers’ Occupational Health

“…In the field of the teaching profession, studies have focused mainly on variables such as emotional intelligence [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ].…”

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Fostered? The Perspective of Social Learning Theory

“…Many studies are investigating how to improve employee positive behavior (Huang et al, 2021 , 2022 ; Zhu et al, 2021 ). However, these studies ignore the changing perspective of emotional intelligence and instead employ a trait perspective of emotional intelligence (Agnoli et al, 2019 ; Alegre et al, 2019 ; Kun et al, 2019 ) to examine its impact on positive employee behavior, including well-being, job satisfaction and trust (Knight et al, 2015 ; Di Fabio and Kenny, 2016 ; Peláez-Fernández et al, 2021 ). Emotional intelligence refers to people's ability to use and regulate emotions and to evaluate other people's and self-emotions (Salovey and Mayer, 1990 ).…”