School Climate and its Impact on Teachers' Surface Acting: Emotional Intelligence as Moderator

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Teachers invest great deal of dedication to be able to do tasks expected from them to accomplish in every day. With the stressful task asked from teachers, emotion are usually at stake. Teachers' emotion directly affect the students' physical and mental development. The teachers' emotional labor affects their work efficiency and quality. The teachers’ perception of the school climate where they works is related to his behavior and emotion towards the school. In previous studies, it has been proven that the teachers' perception of the school climate affects their emotional labor, however only few studies have directly examined the relationship among school climate, surface acting, and emotional intelligence of teachers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among school climate in teachers' perception, teachers' surface acting, and emotional intelligence.

METHODS

Participants were 600 teachers from different schools in NCR, Central, and South Luzon. This research is pure quantitative in nature and data were gathered through convenient sampling. The researchers adapted validated questionnaires to measure Surface Acting, Emotional Intelligence and School Climate.

RESULTS

The data resulted from Pearson correlation analysis showed that school climate to surface acting has "strong positive" relationship. On the other hand, emotional intelligence to school climate (0.032) and surface acting to emotional intelligence (0.072) both have a "very weak" positive correlation. The linear regression between variables showed there is a significant difference between the predictors (school climate, emotional intelligence) and the dependent variable (surface acting). The effect of school climate on a teacher's surface acting has an R-squared model value equal to 52.52% which proves that emotional intelligence has a moderating effect which can give an increase of 1.60%.

DISCUSSIONS

This study revealed that the relationship between the teachers' perception of the school climate and the teachers' surface acting is moderated by the teachers' emotional intelligence. Thus it concludes that emotional intelligence has an effect on the teachers' tendency to surface act. Additionally, this finding also enriches the emotional labor literature by considering the school climate to be an antecedent of emotional labor. Emotional intelligence was associated with surface acting among teachers inboth private and public schools in National Capital Region and Central Luzon.