Faculty Emotion Regulation, Stress, and Well-Being

• In Event: Examining Faculty Burnout, Well-Being, and Job Performance

Abstract

Empirical evidence suggests that contemporary faculty members are subjected to unprecedented levels of job-related stress arising from time constraints, role conflict, pursuit of tenure, work– life conflict, interacting with large numbers of students, and lack of support (Catano et al., 2010; Sun, Wu, & Wang, 2011; Tytherleigh, Webb, Cooper, & Ricketts, 2005; Winefield et al., 2003). Stress has debilitating consequences on faculty members’ physical and psychological well-being (e.g., Catano et al., 2010; Sharpley, Reynolds, Acosta, & Dua, 1996; Shen et al., 2014) and their job satisfaction, performance, productivity that, in turn, can negatively influence student learning (Blix, Cruise, Mitchell, & Blix, 1994; Gillespie, Walsh, Winefield, Dua, & Stough, 2001; Stevenson & Harper, 2006; Zhang, 2009).

Research suggests that an individual’s ability to effectively regulate positive and negative emotions can have a crucial impact on his/her physical and psychological well-being (Gross, 2002; Gross & Levenson, 1993; John, & Gross, 2004, see Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010; Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012) and social functioning (Gross, 2002, Lopes, Salovey, Côté, Beers, & Petty, 2005). However, emotion regulation (ER) among faculty remains under-researched with only a handful of studies to date having addressed this topic (Gates, 2000; Regan et al., 2012; Zhang & Zhu, 2008).

The present study aimed to investigate the moderating role of ER on the relationship between stress and well-being. Regulation of negative emotions was investigated through the most widely used ER model, namely Gross’s (1998a, 1998b) process mode of ER (Webb et al., 2012). The model differentiates between two major forms of ER: antecedent-focused and response-focused. The former is activated before appraisals initiate emotion responses, and the latter is activated after emotional responses have been elicited (Gross, 1998a, 1998b). Moreover, response-focused ER typically involves two types of emotion regulation strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.

It is commonly hypothesized that employing reappraisal as a strategy to down-regulate negative emotions should help buffer the negative impact of stress on emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction. As for suppression, it is instead anticipated that use of this strategy should aggravate the adverse impact of stress. Questionnaire data were collected from 384 faculty members from seven Canadian research-intensive universities. To evaluate these hypotheses, a moderation analysis was conducted using the PROCESS moderation macro in SPSS (see Hayes, 2013; Preacher & Hayes, 2004) with the bootstrap sample set to 10,000 and the confidence interval to .95.

Contrary to study hypotheses, no significant moderation effect of reappraisal was found, indicating that the faculty members’ use of this strategy did not significantly moderate the effects of their stress on emotional exhaustion (β = .08, p = .314) or job satisfaction (β = -.05, p = .396). Similarly, faculty members’ use of suppression did not significantly moderate the effects of their stress on emotional exhaustion (β = -.03, p = .099) or job satisfaction (β = .00, p = .980). These findings stand in contrast to the perception that use of reappraisal mitigates against stress or that suppression aggravates it and thus warrant further investigation of the moderating role of other ER strategies among faculty members.

Authors

• Raheleh Salimzadeh, McGill University

• Alenoush Saroyan, McGill University

• Nathan C. Hall, McGill University