The Development of the Teacher Emotional Labor Scale (TELS): Validity and Reliability.

Abstract

Abstract The current study had two main purposes. The first was to develop and validate an instrument to measure labor among teachers (Teacher Emotional Labor Scale, TELS) with an emphasis on regulation strategies during critical work events. The second was to investigate whether deviance could be considered as one of labor strategies. The developed 20-item self-report scale's validity and reliability was tested within high school teachers. The sample for this study consisted of 190 high school teachers working at various public schools in Mugla, Turkey (88 females and 102 males). The teachers were employed on a full-time basis and held no administrative position. The average work experience was 17.14 years (SD = 8.80). Confirmatory factor analysis results supported four dimensional structure of labor separating surface acting, deep acting, automatic regulation, and deviance in current teacher sample. Results also provided initial evidence for construct validity, criterion validity and internal consistency of subscales (ranged from .70 to .81) of TELS. Key Words Emotional Labor, Surface Acting, Deep Acting, Automatic Emotion Regulation, Emotional Deviance, Education. Research from different theoretical and methodological perspectives has begun to investigate important role of emotions in workplace. One of topics that studies at work especially give attention is labor. As sometimes called emotional or emotion work; labor has been conceptualized as multidimensional constructs reflecting various processes, such as display rules (feelings rules), felt and expressed emotions at work (emotional dissonance), internal process and regulation. The concept was first defined thoroughly by Hochschild (1983). She defines labor as regulation of employee's emotions to comply with occupational or organizational norms (emotional display rules). As she puts it the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display... (p. 7). Since Hochschild's (1983) early conceptualization, several labor studies have examined nature, dimensions, antecedents, and outcomes of labor (for reviews, Ashforth, & Humphrey, 1995; Brief, & Weiss, 2002; Cukur, & Sahin, 2007; Morris, & Feldman, 1996; Zapf, 2002). Early labor studies have provided a rich and descriptive data on different aspects of labor processes within various jobs and occupations through case studies and qualitative methods (Hastings, 2004; Hochschild, 1983; Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman, 1998; Nias, 1996; Rafaeli, & Sutton, 1991; Van Manen, & Kunda, 1989). Although these studies have played an import role in theoretical development of labor concepts and strategies, researchers have called for more systematic and quantitative methods to measure labor, determine labor dimensions, and examine antecedents and consequences of labor (Adelman, 1995; Ashforth, & Humphrey, 1995; Morris, & Feldman, 1996; Wharton, 1993). In this context, there have been several attempts to develop quantitative measures of labor that have focused on different dimensions or strategies of labor (Brotheridge, & Grandey, 2002; Brotheridge, & Lee, 2003; Diefendorff, Croyle, & Gosserand, 2005; Glomb, & Tews, 2004; Kruml, & Geddes, 2000; Morris, & Feldman, 1996). This study is part of these efforts. The main purpose of this study is to develop and validate an instrument to measure labor. Unlike many of previous labor scales, scale is solely designed to assess labor among teachers (Teacher Emotional Labor Scale, TELS). TELS was developed to measure labor that teachers perform for their students, coworkers, and supervisors. …