Teacher-Student Relatedness and Teachers’ Emotional Lives

• In Event: Antecedents and Correlates of Teachers’ Relational Work

Abstract

There are isolated findings that teacher-student relatedness is connected to teachers’ emotional experiences in the classroom (Klassen, Perry, & Frenzel, 2012). Also, within organizational research positive links have been found between the quality of the leader-follower relationship and the leaders’ emotional authenticity (i.e., the genuine expression of emotions rather than hiding or faking them; Fiske & Friesen, 2010). The aim of this research was to connect these findings by examining the link between teacher-student relatedness and teachers’ emotional lives.

Methods: A total of 266 American secondary teachers filled out a scale assessing their feelings of relatedness to students (4 items, taken from Klassen, Perry, & Frenzel, 2012, Cronbach’s Alpha=.78) and six scales addressing their emotional lives in the classroom, including the experience of positive and negative emotions, genuine expression of positive and negative emotions, faking positive emotions, and hiding negative emotions (adapted from Glomb & Tews, 2004).

Results: First, we did a confirmatory factor analysis to examine the internal validity of the proposed six-factor model of teachers’ emotional lives. The model showed a good fit (²/df=1.82, CFI=.95, TLI=.94, RMSEA=.056). Within the positive emotions experiencing, expressing and faking were all positively correlated. Within the negative emotions experiencing, expressing and hiding were all positively correlated. In addition, across the valences experiencing positive emotions was negatively correlated with experiencing negative emotions, expressing positive emotions was negatively correlated with experiencing negative emotions, and hiding negative emotions was positively correlated with faking positive emotions.

Next, we ran a structural model that included feelings of relatedness to students, which had a good fit (²/df =1.65, CFI=.95 TLI=.94, RMSEA=.049). Teacher-student relatedness was negatively associated with experiencing, expressing and hiding negative emotions, while relatedness was positively associated with experiencing and expressing positive emotions. Faking positive emotions was unrelated to relatedness.

Discussion: Our analyses on teachers’ emotional lives revealed that teachers do not simply idealize their emotional lives by reporting exaggerated positive and downplayed negative emotions. Instead, the intensity of positive and negative emotions within teachers seems to play a role, with the experience and expression of more positive emotions also being accompanied by an increased likelihood of faking positive emotions and the experience of more negative emotions not only leading to expressing those emotions, but simultaneously to trying to hide them. Furthermore, teachers’ tendency to hide negative emotions is accompanied with faking positive emotions, which is an indication of teachers’ “inauthenticity” in the classroom.

We could further show that feeling related to students is associated with teachers experiencing and expressing more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions. Interestingly, teachers who feel related to their students are also less likely to hide their negative emotions. It could be that through feeling related to students teachers have fewer reasons to experience and express negative emotions, but if there are reasonable causes for negative emotions, they feel more at liberty to be authentic and not hide their negative feelings. Overall, our findings support the importance of teacher-student relatedness for teachers' emotional lives.

Authors

• Jamie Taxer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Anne C. Frenzel, University of Munich (LMU)