EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2019.1705868

Emotional labour, teaching and burnout: Investigating

complex relationships
a b
Grayson Bodenheimer and Stef M. Shuster
a
Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA; bLyman Briggs College and
Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Background: In common with other service-oriented occupations, Received 25 July 2018
teaching is a profession that requires employees to engage in Accepted 13 December 2019
emotional labour. In order to perform their day-to-day roles effec- KEYWORDS
tively, teachers are expected to manage and utilise their emotions Teacher burnout; emotional
in nuanced ways, with a high degree of control. As research sug- labour; teachers; feeling
gests a complex relationship between emotional labour and occu- rules; organisations; emotion
pational burnout, it is essential to examine this further in the management
context of teaching, so as to better understand the issues asso-
ciated with teacher burnout.
Purpose: This paper aims to explore the literature on emotional
labour and burnout, using the lens of sociological research to
examine how multiple contexts shape people’s experiences in
occupations. We present a theoretical discussion on how expecta-
tions for emotion displays and management, alongside structural
factors, may shape the experiences of teachers.
Sources of evidence: We reviewed literature on emotional labour
and burnout to examine this relationship within the context of
contemporary constraints, including educational policies, account-
ability and emergent interpersonal dynamics in the everyday lives
of school teachers. We focussed mainly on the United States public
school system and used search terms including emotional labour,
emotion work, emotion management and feeling rules. An inductive
analytic strategy was used to identify common themes in the
literature.
Findings and Conclusion: The thematic analysis of literature sug-
gested that the intertwining of structural- and interactional-level
expectations for emotional labour fosters close yet complicated
relationships with teacher burnout. In bringing attention to these
relationships, we offer suggestions as to the directions education
researchers and administrators might take to better comprehend
and address teacher burnout.

Introduction
The rapid expansion of the American service economy has resulted in shifting normative
expectations for service employees (Wharton 2009). Among the most salient of these is
the expectation for workers to engage in emotional labour (Hochschild 1983), which
refers to the ‘effort, planning, and control needed to express organisationally desired

CONTACT Grayson Bodenheimer graboden@iu.edu

© 2019 NFER
2 G. BODENHEIMER AND S. M. SHUSTER

emotions during interpersonal interactions’ (Morris and Feldman 1996, 987). Rather than
being matters of personal discretion, feelings become exchanged commodities with
economic value attached to them (Hochschild 1983). In these contexts, service occupa-
tions, including teaching, require employees to portray occupationally defined appro-
priate emotional displays and attitudes that will elicit specific feelings in the people with
whom they are working (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002; Hochschild 1983).
Teachers are thus expected to employ emotional labour to portray and, ideally,
experience emotions that conform to professional norms that shape interaction in orga-
nisational contexts. Scholars’ findings on the implications that these expectations have on
teachers remain equivocal. In this paper, we offer a theoretical discussion through
a sociological lens to explore the complicated relationships between teachers, burnout
and emotional labour. Focusing mainly on the United States, the context for this inves-
tigation is contemporary constraints within the education system, including educational
policies, accountability and the emergent interpersonal dynamics within the everyday
teaching experience.
As already mentioned, ‘burnout’ is a complex and much-discussed phenomenon.
Further complicating the scholarship on burnout in education is the way in which
educational institutions sit at the nexus of federal mandates for instruction, organisational
dynamics at the school level and dyadic relationships between teachers and students, as
well as teachers and supervisors. Within these intertwining levels of social life, research
that exclusively focuses on one level (e.g. the level of the individual) may inadvertently
gloss over important structural constraints and opportunities that additionally shape
teachers’ experiences. For example, scholars in the fields of psychology and education
have drawn attention to how workers experience burnout as a result of the congruence
and discordance between their personal emotional states and occupational expectations
(see Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, and Wax 2012; Morris and Feldman 1996). Alongside
these occupational constraints, teachers are expected to express conflicting emotions on-
the-job (Hargreaves 1998). For example, in their relationships with students, they are
expected to demonstrate warmth on the one hand (e.g. showing encouragement and
empathy to promote student learning and wellbeing), and an objective emotional neu-
trality on the other (e.g. impartiality in terms of assessment and evaluation).
The field of sociology provides rich literatures in the social study of emotions (e.g.
Hochschild 1979; Heise and Calhan 1995) and the social contexts that shape education
(e.g. Golann 2017; Everitt 2013). However, there is relatively little sociological scholarship
on environmental influences on teacher emotions (see Tsang 2013), particularly regarding
emotional labour, teacher burnout and organisational structures. This seems especially
true in the context of major changes in American education since the onset of the No
Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (see Coburn, Hill, and Spillane 2016), which has fundamen-
tally altered the landscape of the American educational system. With increasing account-
ability within the system, teachers face greater demands to standardise curricula,
especially in meeting baseline test scores (Everitt 2013).
We suggest that while sociology offers the tools for a close analysis of social contexts,
the study of the complex phenomenon of burnout in relation to education has many
conceptual, methodological and pragmatic challenges. For example, it has been argued
that burnout, historically, has frequently been perceived as an individual fault, rather than
a consequence of structural and organisational demands placed upon service workers
 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 3

(Maslach and Leiter 2016). Furthermore, teachers do not compose a homogenous occu-
pational category. Localised cultures and state-based mandates shape the micro-
dynamics within which teachers work (Hallett 2010), the degree of autonomy they have
in their jobs and work-lives as teachers (Coburn 2004) and the expectations to perform
emotional labour (Oplatka 2009).

Purpose
In this study, we aimed to explore ideas in the literature related to the micro- and macro-
level relationships between emotional labour and teacher burnout. Since the early 2000s,
a robust literature has emerged on educator burnout, especially for those professionals
working in higher education settings. These important studies have helped education
researchers identify the variables most likely to predict burnout (see Watts and Robertson
2011) and how burnout manifests within different countries and educational systems (e.g.
Kinman 2014). For this present study, however, we sought to prioritise educators who
work with youth, rather than college students. We also chose to focus on the relationship
between structural and micro-level contexts that shape teacher burnout. Our investiga-
tion was guided by two overarching questions: (1) How might features of the structure of
education – including policy reforms, changes in expectations placed upon teachers from
organisations, and increasing standardisation in curriculum – shape expectations for
emotional labour among teachers? (2) With these expectations in place, what does it
suggest about the relationship between emotional labour and burnout among American
teachers at the micro-level of interaction?

Sources of evidence
We focussed our literature search on empirical social science research on education in the
fields of sociology, social psychology, organisational studies, administrative studies and
education research. We further limited our analysis to peer-reviewed articles published in
English. We used the ProQuest Social Sciences database, as it provides a pan-disciplinary
collection of databases (e.g., ERIC, PsychINFO, Sociological Abstracts). We sampled exist-
ing literature on emotional labour and burnout in educational occupations. To narrow the
scope, we initially focussed only on those papers that considered the US public school
system, as it is important to acknowledge that the structure of an educational system in
one country differs from others. However, an emergent finding from our analysis was that
some research suggests that educational practices across some cultural contexts are
becoming increasingly homogenous: a process known as isomorphism (Roach, Smith,
and Boutin 2010; Brown and Stevick 2014). In recognition of this, where relevant, we also
decided to include research on teachers outside of American schools in our discussion.
We used two major clusters of search parameters, as we were aware from previous
research that examining both the structural and micro-level contexts that shaped teacher
burnout was an important theoretical consideration. Thus, for emotional labour we used
the following terms: emotional labour, emotion work, emotion management and feeling
rules. Our searches for teacher burnout in education were further constrained to teacher
burnout and its core components of emotional exhaustion, personal accomplishment and
depersonalisation. As many relevant publications referred to teacher burnout as closely
4 G. BODENHEIMER AND S. M. SHUSTER

related to turnover, we also searched for research on teacher turnover and teacher attrition
that investigated emotional labour. While acknowledging the worldwide education sys-
tem reforms over the past 50 years, we did not exclude older work on teacher burnout
from our search, as we wanted to take into account influential publications that have
guided contemporary research and scholarly discussion in the fields of emotional labour
and teacher burnout.
In order to identify common themes in the literature, we used an inductive analytic
strategy. These themes led to the structuring of our findings and discussion. In what follows,
we first focus on the educational context. Specifically, we look at the structural components
of the American education system in relation to emotional labour and burnout, including:
competition-driven incentive structures; normative pressures in education; and competing
professional and emotional norms for teachers. We then examine emotional labour in
education, focusing on surface and deep acting as well as how these elements may be
related to burnout. We conclude by focussing on the various components of structural
constraints and interpersonal dynamics and their relationship with burnout.

Findings and discussion

The educational context: structural features
In this section, we turn our attention to the structural features of American schools that,
the literature suggests, may shape the emotional labour teachers engage in and its
relationship with burnout. The well-documented history of American education and
teaching presents an institution defined by individualism and competition (Lortie 1975;
Goldstein 2014; ESSA 2015). Known colloquially as the ‘egg crate’ model, teachers were
‘assigned specific areas of responsibility’ to which they are held accountable, making
education a modular experience rather than a collaborative one (Lortie 1975, 14).
Recognising the problems associated with isolated teaching, and a lack of accountability,
subsequent American education reforms focussed on increasing standardisation and
teacher accountability, in which teacher efficacy is evaluated on standardised assess-
ments of student achievement (Coburn, Hill, and Spillane 2016). These reforms culmi-
nated in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (see Coburn, Hill, and Spillane
2016), and fundamentally altered the landscape of American primary and secondary
education by placing greater responsibility on teachers for the performance of students.
Such accountability policies have emphasised competition between schools and teachers,
including data-driven evaluations of student, teacher and school performance and the
increased presence of private and charter schools (Goldstein 2014; O’Hara 2015). Data in
education typically consist of results from standardised tests, as these forms of assessment
are recognised as useful tools for aggregate comparisons of teacher and school efficacy
(see Coburn, Hill, and Spillane 2016), leading to a competitive environment between
teachers and schools. Similarly, increased student enrolment in private and charter
schools is intended to create a competitive education market and incentivise public
schools to improve student achievement (Ravitch 2013). Thus, the marketisation of
schools has influenced the discourse shaping the structure of the system and the relation-
ship between teachers, students and schools within the education system.
 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 5

With the changes in education policy and structure described above, new uncertainties
have arisen within the education system. Institutions may respond to uncertainty by
employing institutional isomorphism; for example, mirroring similar institutions with
the aim of gaining legitimacy among peers. Isomorphism can be interpreted as a way
of alleviating uncertainty which also introduces normative pressure for organisations to
conform, supressing innovation (see DiMaggio and Powell [1983] 1991). A prevalent
example of institutional isomorphism found in higher education is the fairly recent
practice of national rankings, and subsequent efforts by universities and colleges to
structure programmes to remain competitive with peer institutions, rather than being
driven by the existing strengths of an institution (see Espeland and Sauder 2016). In
sociological terms, ranking systems may be understood as a self-fulfiling prophecy, as
they exert coercive pressure for colleges to conform to the ranking system. These efforts
to meet the rankings may limit innovative curriculum and/or classroom design as admin-
istrators are concerned that innovation will not ‘play well’ in the ranking system. As it is
held that individuals do not typically challenge the assumptions and norms that govern
everyday life (Garfinkel 1964), a concern that manifests in the context of change and
uncertainty is that decisions at high levels are made in order to accrue legitimacy rather
than what may be in the best interest of schools, teachers and students (see Paino 2018;
Hallett 2007). In doing so, educational administrators may perpetuate the reification of
myths and cultural norms that are perceived as ahistorical and factual, rather than
developing projects shaped by the people who maintain them.
A particular difficulty with structuring an institution based on what peers are doing is that
individuals in lower-power positions may have varying perceptions of what their profes-
sional roles should entail. At the same time, those in higher-power positions assume that
their decision-making, perceived as rational and legitimated by peers, is ‘correct’ (see also
Everitt and Tefft 2018). The consolidation of these norms may result in organisational
cultures that further perpetuate the non-rational aspects of organisations (Morrill 2008)
while upholding the status quo, in order to maintain legitimacy with peer institutions.
Thus far, this discussion has focussed on describing the structural relationships which,
it is argued, emerge from normative pressures. However, it is also important to consider
the feeling rules of occupations and the emotional labour expected of workers through
the institutional norms of conduct and which are particular to professions (Hochschild
1983). In order to do this, we turn now to recent discussions about the feeling rules that
shape teachers’ experiences.
The use of emotions and the management of emotion are vital to the maintenance of
the education system and the everyday work involved in teaching. However, at both the
structural and interactional level, there are competing feeling rules outlining how tea-
chers are supposed to feel about their students and what emotions are perceived as
‘appropriate’ to employ at the interactional level. Specifically, teachers are expected to be
both warm in their emotional registers (e.g. kind, friendly, compassionate), while at the
same time holding back emotions (e.g. maintaining objectivity) with students when it
comes to undertaking a wide range of professional duties, such as assessing student work
and regulating misbehaviour. Carrying out caring aspects of the teaching role, while
suppressing emotional reactions, as appropriate, requires the use of extensive emotional
labour and impression management to negotiate the professional demands of the day-to-
day job of teaching.
6 G. BODENHEIMER AND S. M. SHUSTER

Hargreaves (1998) maintains that teaching ‘is an emotional practice which involves
relationships with others and seeks to shape those relationships in particular ways’ (838;
see also Frenzel et al. 2009). Consequently, teachers have strong feelings about their
interactions, their relationships in schools, and their professional skills to educate students
effectively (Nias 1996). A key component of teachers’ relationships is affection, which Nias
(1989) characterises as ‘a felt-need to love [students] and be loved [by students].’ While
teachers frequently invoke positive, warm emotions, like affection, when describing their
feelings towards teaching and interacting with students, Nias (1989) demonstrates how
many of these same teachers interviewed for her research experienced conflicting emo-
tions in relation to the schools they worked in, administrators, and the structure of
education writ large.
At the same time that affection for students prevails as a governing norm for teachers’
emotional registers, teachers are also expected to portray what sociologists refer to as
‘affective neutrality’ (Heise and Calhan 1995), or the suppressing of displays of emotion.
Current American education norms align with emotional neutrality by privileging educational
objectivity – especially when assessing student performance in the classroom, such as when
grading exams or papers (Cain 2003), or when regulating student misbehaviour (Chang 2009).
Teachers are also expected to display neutrality when asked to adjust to changes in the
educational bureaucracy and the standards that it enforces (Hargreaves 2000). Thus, main-
taining the delicate, professional balance between affective neutrality and pastoral interest in
students’ wellbeing and development requires teachers’ constant emotion management, in
order to satisfy feeling rules and meet the stakeholders’ expectations of the role.
Alongside this, there can be a tension between the characterisation of the notion of
professionalism and the need to conform to standards. Professions are characterised by
expertise, training, and skills (Abbott 1988). To be a ‘professional’ typically translates to
having autonomy in work-related tasks. As noted by Coburn (2004), teachers retain
autonomy over their pedagogy, despite the move towards greater standardisation of
learning outcomes through testing and assessment. In the American educational system,
there has been both increasing movement towards standardising outcomes through
performance evaluations in national testing (e.g. Every Child Succeeds Act), while retain-
ing the ideological notion that teachers have autonomy in their classrooms (Coburn, Hill,
and Spillane 2016; Hallett 2010). Standardising learning outcomes through state-level
testing may place teachers in a challenging position of being experts in their fields, having
autonomy in the classroom, and at the same time conforming to standardisation.
Teachers may, thus, use emotional labour to suppress any negative emotions they may
feel when experiencing significant changes to their autonomy, professional identity and
their relationships with students (Tsang 2013).

Emotional labour
The phenomenon of emotional labour gained attention after the publication of
Hochschild’s (1983) The Managed Heart. By observing how flight attendants and bill
collectors implemented their occupational roles, Hochschild (1983) determined that
workers could identify too wholeheartedly with their role and risk burnout, distance
themselves from their performance on the job and risk feeling ‘phoney’, or estrange
themselves from acting altogether and risk losing their jobs. Hochschild (1983) contends
 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 7

that when emotions become a commodity, individuals may lose touch with their private
emotional selves – what Hochschild calls alienation – as they routinely enact emotions
that conform to workplace expectations rather than align with their inner feelings. Since
Hochschild’s (1983) ground-breaking work, a considerable amount of scholarship has
emerged to examine the consequences of emotional labour. Emotional labour has
repeatedly been shown to contribute to emotional exhaustion, as individuals become
alienated from their ‘genuine’ emotions (Cooper, Dewe, and O’Driscoll 2001). In contrast
to Hochschild’s notion that emotional labour is detrimental to workers, some have
suggested that emotional demands do not always lead to stress or alienation from
one’s self: rather, the potential harmful effects of emotional labour can be moderated
by social and personal identities. For example, as Brotheridge and Grandey (2002) sug-
gest, compared with other occupations, healthcare workers report the highest level of
frequency, variety, intensity, and duration of emotional display and expectations for
control over emotional expressions (31–32). According to their findings, health care
providers who strongly identify with the doctor role can reduce the negative effects of
feeling rules that conflict with personal feelings. It is conceivable, perhaps, that teachers
could experience similar benefits when managing their feelings to align with dominant
feeling rules in education. As Mann (2005) argues, it is not the performance of emotional
management that is harmful. Rather, it is the expectation of having to manage emotions
that is harmful in the workplace.
Some scholars support the use of emotional labour in service work, as there may be
instances when it confers advantages to both employers and workers. Fineman (1993)
suggests that teachers are paid for their emotion management as a given aspect of
teaching. Following this logic, greater financial compensation may help prevent teacher
burnout through increased perceptions of accomplishment and job satisfaction (Dworkin
1987). In contrast, other scholars argue that financial compensation reduces neither
teachers’ perceptions of burnout nor emotional exhaustion (Dworkin 1987, 170). More
generally, service workers may experience compensation for emotional labour as hypoc-
risy pay (Foegen 1988). Recent work in school psychology indicates that salary may have
no significant effect on teachers’ experiences of burnout, though the authors do not
discount the importance of salary in conjunction with other occupational factors
(Schilling, Randolph, and Boan-Lenzo 2018). Though no clear relationship has been
found, teachers’ salaries do not appear to contribute to teacher burnout. Instead, sociol-
ogists and organisational scholars have directed attention to workplace interactions,
noting that professional and feeling rules influence how people interact at work and
may contribute to alienation and burnout (Ward and McMurray 2016; Scheff 1990).
Given the competing emotional and professional norms governing the everyday work-
place experiences in American and other educational systems, teachers engage in sig-
nificant emotional labour as a routine part of their jobs. Like other institutional domains,
such as healthcare, there is growing scholarly interest on the consequences of such types
of labour on workers. In what follows, we turn to the notions of surface acting and deep
acting, as it is suggested that these are strategies employed by teachers to respond to
conflicting emotional and professional norms. Through her distinctions of surface and
deep Hochschild (1979, 1983) offered a language for scholars to describe and explore how
workers negotiate feeling rules and labour. Surface acting involves portraying emotions to
a public but without actually feeling them (Hochschild 1983, 33). In contrast, deep acting
8 G. BODENHEIMER AND S. M. SHUSTER

is understood as portraying emotions to a public where the actor is unaware that it is an

‘act’ (Hochschild 1983, 33). Scholars have observed that teachers often choose to employ
emotional labour to regulate classroom behaviour, reduce bias while grading, or bolster
feelings of pride when students succeed in their classes (Chang 2009; Brackett et al. 2013;
Schutz and Lee 2014). Leidner (1993) discovered that, as a component of routinisation,
surface acting empowers service workers autonomously to detach from their roles,
protecting their identities from the consequences of service work (see also Morris and
Feldman 1996). Service workers can also use deep acting to transform their selves ‘into the
sorts of people who will make the desired decisions’ on the job (Leidner 1993, 38),
increasing their utility to the organisation. However, without the autonomy to employ
discretion in the use of surface acting, it may have detrimental effects on workers. The
extended use of surface acting may perpetuate emotional exhaustion and diminishing
perceptions of personal accomplishment (Wang, Hall, and Taxer 2019; Noor and
Zainuddin 2011). For emotion work to be effective in long-term interactions, it is argued
that individuals must be socialised into their work roles, where the occupational role
becomes a greater part of the individual’s identity (Ashforth and Humphrey 1993). Deep
acting requires workers not only to portray organisationally desired emotions, but actually
to feel these emotions as if they were their own (Hochschild 1983; Morris and Feldman
1996), as workers come to internalise the expectations for feeling in any given situation.
Part of Hochschild’s (1983) concerns regarding deep acting was linked to an inauthen-
ticity of emotions. Yet, for teachers, there are indications that deep acting has not been
found to correlate with depersonalisation or emotional exhaustion (Yilmaz et al. 2015).
Some scholars have demonstrated how deep acting can lead to authentic feeling in the
classroom. Deep acting requires some authentic feeling to be effective (Hargreaves 1998),
as evidenced by training programmes that emphasise positive thinking, such as teachers’
wishes to help children or finding joy in teaching (Noor and Zainuddin 2011). For example,
as student misbehaviour is a major stressor for teachers, deep acting can instigate feelings
of accomplishment when student behaviour improves (Chang 2009, 2013). Such attempts
to feel parts of the role appear to lead to authenticity.

Teacher burnout
It has been suggested that US educators are now particularly prone to burnout (Durr,
Chang, and Carson 2014). Burnout is understood as a ‘syndrome of emotional exhaustion
and cynicism that occurs frequently among individuals who do “people-work” of some
kind’ (Maslach and Jackson 1981, 99). Manifesting as a prolonged feeling state, burnout is
comprised of three interrelated dimensions: emotional exhaustion, detachment and lack
of personal accomplishment (Watts and Robertson 2011). The prevailing discourse of
burnout tends to portray individuals as responsible for burnout rather than addressing
the relevant socio-cultural and organisational contexts (see Maslach and Leiter 2016). In
line with this conceptualisation, a typical method of addressing teacher burnout instructs
teachers to turn to individual-based coping mechanisms after having experienced burn-
out (see Chang 2009; Dworkin 1987, 159). Some research suggests that surface acting may
be conducive to burnout, through its characteristics of high levels of emotional exhaus-
tion and depersonalisation, leaving employees without feelings of personal accomplish-
ment (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002; Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, and Wax 2012). Thus,
 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 9

by depicting emotions without actually feeling them, workers may face emotional
exhaustion while lacking a sense of personal accomplishment brought about by associat-
ing their actions with their worker identity. In effect, workers who consistently engage in
surface acting may, over time, no longer be able to identify with their work roles, as the
line between fake and real feelings dissolves.
The use of surface acting in the classroom has been linked to teacher burnout, with
attention given to experiences of emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation (Durr,
Chang, and Carson 2014; Naring, Vlerick, and Van de Ven 2012; Keller et al. 2014). For
example, some research suggests that teachers who frequently employ surface acting on
the job are significantly more likely to experience emotional exhaustion (Basim,
Begenirbas, and Yalcin 2013) and diminished physical health (Taxer and Frenzel 2015),
creating a negative feedback loop that culminates in occupational burnout (Philipp and
Schüpbach 2010). Surface acting has been shown to be associated not only with symp-
toms of burnout, but also with specific institutional demands such as education display
rules shaping the emotions teachers are expected to display (Wang, Hall, and Taxer 2019).
Teachers who face burnout tend to be experienced in their fields; early-career teacher
turnover has been linked to a lack of positive relationships with students, colleagues or
administrators and an inability to cope with demanding work experiences (Hargreaves
2000; Intrator 2006). Experienced teachers who experience burnout either succumb to
emotional exhaustion that has occurred over their careers or, more commonly, struggle
with changes to their ways of teaching (Chang 2009; Hargreaves 2000). New adminis-
trators, regulations and bureaucratic structures often require teachers to change how
they teach. Ingersoll and Collins (2018) found that adequate training programmes to
support experienced teachers in adjusting to the amended expectations do not typically
accompany these shifts. In instances of higher leadership changes or turnover, teachers
may turn to deep acting to remain congenial with the administrators who may enforce
new regulations. Improved training programmes that inform teachers of changes to the
educational system as they occur could prevent frustrations with administrators over such
issues, thereby reducing the necessity for emotional labour in these interactional contexts
(Everitt 2017). Like many other caring professions, teaching requires intense and pro-
longed interaction (Hargreaves 1998); these interactions frequently lead to the formation
of bonds between teachers and students. Maintaining these bonds involves intense
emotional investment (Scheff 1990) and requires the use of emotional labour to align
the relationship with professional expectations. Though the frequency and intensity of
interactions with students can buffer teachers against burnout (Brotheridge and Grandey
2002), weak or negative bonds amplify experiences of burnout. Situations such as difficult
classrooms, distant administrators and confrontational parents present teachers with
negative bonds that can contribute to burnout (Chang 2009).
Some research draws attention to the vital role of principals in augmenting or minimising
burnout, as principals are intermediaries between teachers and educational standards (see
Dworkin 1987; Maslach and Leiter 2016). For example, upper level administrators can
alleviate strain felt by teachers by moderating the imposition of state-mandated learning-
based outcomes in cases where teachers feel that it conflicts with their professional
pedagogical autonomy in the classroom. Administrators can also support teachers’ range
of emotions expressed in interactions. Upper level administrators can, therefore, play a vital
role in providing teachers with a sense of personal accomplishment, and a support system
10 G. BODENHEIMER AND S. M. SHUSTER

which guards against the negative consequences of emotional labour in the classroom
(Brissie, Hoover-Dempsey, and Bassler 1988; Liljestrom, Roulston, and DeMarrais 2007).
Acting as advocates for teachers – by mediating between the structural considerations of
federal- and state-level mandates combined with micro-level considerations of schools and
classrooms in professional and emotional expectations (Hallett 2010) – may enable admin-
istrators to take an active role in dampening the potential for burnout among teachers.
Teachers may manage their emotions to gain favourable evaluations when interacting
with administrators who emphasise educational accountability to meeting state-level
testing standards and localised curriculum (Hallett 2010). Increased understanding of
surface and deep acting in education can help researchers to analyse teachers’ perspec-
tives of deep acting more fully and be mindful, as Hochschild (1979) suggested, of the
operationalisation of these forms of acting when examining emotional labour in relation
to teacher–administrator interactions.

Conclusion
Through our analysis, we have explored the complex relationships between organisational
structure, emotional labour and teacher burnout in education. In doing so, we hope to gain
insight into the links between the macro- and micro-level of social life that contribute to
teachers’ experiences of burnout. Teaching is a social enterprise enacted within a well-
defined institutional environment (Carr 2003) in which socially constructed norms define
roles and interaction (Tsang 2013). However, ambiguity permeates the conflicting interac-
tion norms that teachers are expected to balance on a daily basis, which may make
teachers particularly prone to experiencing burnout. While much research has considered
innumerable factors concerning individual teachers and schools, we believe there remains
insufficient sociological consideration of feeling rules or burnout in the American educa-
tional system (Tsang 2013), or how to address these problems systemically.
Teaching, like most professions, does not occur in a social vacuum. The bureaucracy of
the educational institution is paramount to understanding the unintended consequences
of emotional labour. Fluctuating bureaucratic structures have multiple potential conse-
quences for educators. Though standardisation provides useful information for under-
standing aspects of student outcomes, some research suggests that it erodes teachers’
feelings of autonomy (Coburn 2004) and may also reinforce affectively neutral feeling
rules to provide objective assessment (Cain 2003). While emotional neutrality has been
largely dismissed outside of medical and judicial contexts (Heise and Calhan 1995), both
the public and the educational system expect teachers to assess students objectively
rather than allowing their feelings to influence how students are taught or graded.
Similarly, teachers are expected to shed the role of objective assessor in order to portray
an affective orientation towards students, which requires emotional labour to maintain
(Hargreaves 2000). We argue that it is within these contexts that the phenomenon of
emotional labour in education and its complicated relationship with burnout should
continue to be explored.
Overall, our investigation reinforces the notion that the connections between teaching,
emotional labour and burnout are nuanced and complex. The consensus suggests that the
use of emotional labour to meet conflicting feeling rules in bureaucratic organisations is
generally, though not always, harmful to service workers (Brotheridge and Grandey 2002;
 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 11

Mesmer-Magnus, DeChurch, and Wax 2012). Emotional labour both alienates workers from
their authentic emotions (Basim, Begenirbas, and Yalcin 2013; Hochschild 1983) and supports
them by allowing workers to separate their authentic selves from their work roles (Morris and
Feldman 1996; Leidner 1993), making it a potentially invaluable tool when applied with
teacher discretion, and to enable emotional autonomy as teachers navigate competing
demands. Whilst it may be the case that prioritising autonomy among teachers could help
facilitate easing the demands of emotional labour and, consequently, abate expectations
associated with burnout, more research is needed to explore these important dimensions.
Historically, support for the cultural myth that burnout is the fault of individuals
(Maslach and Leiter 2016) may have made educational organisations slow to engage
with their responsibilities in understanding and helping to prevent burnout. However, this
is clearly counterproductive, because education is a social institution whose foundation is
in the interactions between teachers and students (Carr 2003): the effects of teacher
burnout are pervasive and impact individuals and the social structures of society (Cooper,
Dewe, and O’Driscoll 2001). That is, the negative consequences of conflicting professional
expectations – in this case, burnout – are the product of conflicting norms within an
uncertain organisational emotion culture, placing the impetus of action on teachers to
either cope with or repress their feelings of burnout, or risk unemployment. The task for
social scientists is to investigate the implementation and consequences of these conflict-
ing feeling rules, the cultural myths reifying their use, and explore how best to support
teachers within the modern education system. It is our hope that this discussion has
contributed by providing insights into the complex relationships between teaching,
emotional labour and burnout, thereby laying some groundwork for future scholarship.

Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Celeste Campos-Castillo for generously offering feedback on an earlier version of
this manuscript and the editorial team and anonymous reviewers for precise comments that
strengthened the insights offered here.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID
Grayson Bodenheimer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7333-8801
Stef M. Shuster http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1970-5257

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