Abstract:

At present, exceptionally high demands are placed on the performance of many, especially the helping professions. The teaching profession is no exception. Whether it is the social specifics of the performance of the teaching profession, the motivational potential, the characteristics of the work, or the autonomy of the teacher in its performance, all of this is enhanced by the transformational, political and economic changes of society creating daily pressure on the teacher, so it is imperative to pay attention to the management of workload from the perspective of the subjective well-being of these specific professionals. The present paper aims to analyse the correlations between preferred workload coping strategies and current levels of subjective well-being as conceptualised by Diener (2000) and Tobin et al. (2001). The research population consisted of 233 teachers. Coping strategies were measured by the Coping Strategies Inventory (CSI-Tobin et al., 2001), the emotional component of subjective well-being was measured by the Emotional Habitual Subjective Well-Being Questionnaire (SEHP-Dzhuka & Dalbert, 2002), and the cognitive component was measured by the Life Satisfaction Questionnaire (LSQ-Fahrenberg et al. (1994). The research findings reveal several positive and negative significant relationships between different coping strategies and components of subjective well-being, e.g. between self-blame and satisfaction with friends and relatives (rs=-.376; p=.006), housing (rs=-.219; p=.001), overall life satisfaction (rs=-.244; p=.029) and experiencing negative emotionality (rs=.304; p=.007). Many other findings led to the conclusion that teachers' tendency to adopt diversionary emotion-focused coping strategies was primarily related to experiencing negative emotions, and the tendency to adopt problem-focused coping strategies was, in turn, related to experiencing joy, happiness, and contentment. The findings are limited by the self-report instruments as well as the size of the research population. Nevertheless, they are valuable contributions in an attempt to highlight the necessity of developing emotion regulation and training optimal burden management in Slovak teachers.

Keywords:

Coping, teachers, subjective wellbeing, emotional regulation.