The Effects of Work Climate on Teachers' Stress: Mediating Role of Teachers' Emotion Regulation

Introduction: Early childhood teachers’ stress is recognized as an important contributor to teachers’ overall health as well as children’s wellbeing. More stressed teachers are more likely to be exhausted with their job (Montgomery & Rupp, 2005) and less likely to be sensitive to children’s needs (de Schipper et al., 2009). Although early childhood teachers often face stressful situations, few studies have investigated contextual factors in relation to teachers’ stress. In this study, we examined teacher-perceived work climate, relationships with children’s parents, and child behaviors as predictors of their stress. In addition, we explored whether teachers’ emotion regulation mediates those associations as teachers’ emotional abilities may play an important role in coping with the stressors from the environments.

Methods: We collected data from 1,129 preschool-aged classroom teachers in daycare and public pre-K programs across the US using stratified random sampling. Teachers responded on the contextual factors, the use of emotion regulation strategies (reappraisal and suppression) and the degree of stress. We conducted a path analysis to test the direct and indirect associations between contextual factors and teachers’ stress through emotion regulation using 5,000 bootstrap samples. We controlled for teachers’ demographics (age, sex, race/ethnicity, marital status, general health, salary, and household income), professional background (educational attainment, teaching license, experience years, lead teacher status, participation in professional development), program characteristics (size, non-profit, public pre-K, Head Start, national accreditation).

Results: Work climate (e.g., relationships with co-workers and director; β = -.14, p < .001), relationships with parents (β = -.11, p < .001) and child behaviors (β = .13, p < .001) were all directly associated with teachers’ stress. When teachers perceived work climate as more ideal and reported better relationships with parents, they used more reappraisal emotion regulation strategies, which in turn were associated with lower levels of stress (indirect β = -.01, p < .05 for work climate and β = -.01, p < .05 for relationships with parents). Otherwise, when teachers perceived children as being more challenging (e.g., difficulty following directions), they utilized more suppression strategies, which in turn were associated with a higher degree of stress in teachers (β = .01, p = .07).

Conclusions: The current study suggests the need to create supportive environments for improving teachers’ emotional abilities and psychological wellbeing. In addition, professional development focused on emotion regulation skills would help teachers deal with challenging environments and reduce the level of stress.