Work Climate and Early Childhood Teachers' Stress: Indirect Associations Through Emotion Regulation

• In Event: Early Education Programs, Teacher Well-Being, and Children's Development

Abstract

Teaching is a highly stressful profession due to many stressors that teachers experience – at least one in four teachers describes the teaching profession as stressful (Kyriacou, 2001). Previous studies have shown that aspects of work climate are associated with teacher well-being (Bloom, 1988; Tsigilis et al., 2006). In turn, stress is negatively associated with classroom quality (Zinsser et al., 2013) and teachers’ interactions with children (Whitaker et al., 2015). The transactional theory of coping and stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) suggests that when an individual perceives a stressor as threatening, the individual partakes in an appraisal process. During the appraisal, if a person does not think that he/she can cope with the stressors, the individual experiences increased stress. Alternatively, if a person thinks that the stressors are manageable, he/she attempts to emotionally reappraise the situation (Lazarus, 2006). Thus, it is important to understand how teachers internally handle the stressors in the preschool classroom to gain insight into new strategies for reducing teacher stress. We, therefore, examined emotion regulation as a mediator on the association between work climate and teachers’ stress.

The data were collected from 1,129 preschool-aged classroom teachers across the US. The participants’ characteristics are described in Table 1. To measure teachers’ stress, teachers responded to the Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983). Work climate was measured by three teacher-reported variables: work situation (relationships with co-workers and a director, the work itself, working conditions, and pay and promotion opportunities; Bloom, 1988), support from families (Emlen, Koren, & Schultze, 2000), and children’s behaviors (Rimm-Kaufman et al., 2000). We also used teacher-reported items to measure two emotion regulation strategies (Gross & John, 2003): reappraisal emotion regulation that involves changing an individual’s interpretations of a stressor; and suppression emotion regulation, which occurs when an individual inhibits the expression of negative emotions.

A path analysis was conducted to simultaneously test the direct and indirect associations between work climate and teachers’ stress through emotion regulation strategies after controlling for covariates. We utilized 5,000 bootstrap samples to calculate indirect effects. The path analysis (Figure 1 and Table 2) revealed that the hypothesized mediation model fit the data well, χ2(15, n = 1129) = 13.11, p = .59, RMSEA = .00 (90% CI [.000, .025]), CFI = 1.00. First, all three pre-school climate variables were directly associated with teachers’ stress. Second, when teachers reported better work climate and support from families, they demonstrated a higher degree of reappraisal emotion regulation. In addition, when teachers had more children with challenging behaviors, they utilized more suppression emotion regulation strategies. In turn, teachers’ emotion regulation strategies were significantly associated with their stress.

Our study aligns with past research findings that reappraisal strategies have benefits and are related to decreased stress. The study also has policy and practice implications for ensuring adequate access to mental health resources for teachers in order to manage emotional stress. In addition, a positive work climate for teachers can be fostered. Such interventions could result in improved teacher wellbeing and performance.

Authors

• Lieny Jeon, Johns Hopkins University

• Katherine Ardeleanu, Johns Hopkins University