Abstract:

Teachers are extremely valuable and sacred employees in terms of cultivating the precious works of all generations. It is considered as a pre-acceptance that teachers, who face many problems such as basic wages, work-family conflict, health problems and being appointed to civil service, are engaged about work throughout their careers. While feeling this engagement, how they come into contact with the concept of emotional labor is the focus of the research. In other words, do teachers reflect their feelings as they are despite problems, or do they behave as they should? In this context, the relevant research was applied to 192 teachers working in Trabzon in the period of June-July 2022 using the snowball sampling method and the data were collected by face-to-face survey technique. The data were interpreted within the framework of correlation and regression analyzes with the SPSS program. According to the obtained correlation analysis results; there is a significant and positive relationship (r=0.441, p<0.01) between work engagement and emotional labor. Natural emotions, one of the sub-dimensions of emotional labor, have a stronger relationship with work engagement (r=0.339, p<0.01) compared to surface acting and deep acting; absorption, one of the sub-dimensions of work engagement, was found to have a stronger relationship (r=0.446, p<0.01) with emotional labor compared to vigor and dedication. On the other hand, it was observed that the strongest relationship between the sub-dimensions of the two variables was between dedication and deep acting (r=0.443, p<0.01). According to the obtained regression analysis findings; it has been concluded that work engagement has a positive and significant effect on emotional labor (β=0.441; p<0.001) and work engagement has the power to explain a 19% change in emotional labor. As a result, it is thought that the research contributes to teachers, school management and organizational behavior literature.

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