Abstract:

Unfairness is a trigger to burnout among employees. The commitment to the job for employees is influenced by the work conditions. The goal of the company is to have less exhaustion and emotional breakdown amid the employees on the one hand and more commitment to their work on the other hand. Emotional labor refers to the exhibition of socially accepted emotions. In many jobs, it is oriented toward customer satisfaction. However, its depleting consequences for employees are properly acknowledged, especially when surface acting is involved. Less is known on the consequences of emotional consonance and deep acting for employees. We don’t recognize what managers can do to replenish their employees’ resources in a context of effort-reward incongruence at work where employees get stressed and manage their emotions in different ways. Emotional Labor may have consequences on employees’ well-being and commitment. Teaching is an illustration of a quite crucial job which depends a lot on the work conditions to procure the adequate outputs expected from the teacher. With the increasing numbers of professional diseases such as depression and apathy as well as the growing demands with pay and statutory advantages the teaching faculty seems to be vulnerable to emotional exhaustion, faithlessness and emotional labor when it is affected of perceived injustice. Teachers and professors are important for the education of future generations and the prosperity of the countries, that is why this research is interested to study their well-being and commitment. The first objective of this research is to investigate the impact of unfairness at work on teachers and professors to avoid and mitigate the negative consequences. Second, it will discover the emotional labor and its different effects on teachers in the educational context to better understand their feelings and their emotional outputs. Third, its goal is to find a remedy to replenish the teachers’ and professors’ resources and increase their commitment at work. Relying on the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model and the conservation of resources theory, we conduct a study among teachers and professors from different levels of education, working in stressful high-cost/low-gain conditions to examine the role of emotional labor and whether giving high levels of autonomy at work can alleviate the negative consequences of unfairness. Reports from 142 primary teachers, college, high school and university professors indicate that Effort Reward Imbalance positively predicted Burnout and negatively predicted Commitment. Effort reward imbalance at work positively predicted Deep Acting and Surface Acting. Within-person surface acting and deep acting positively predicted burnout. Emotional labor didn’t predict commitment. Analyzing the within-person moderating effects of autonomy at work, we found that it buffers the link of effort-reward imbalance at work on commitment yet did not moderate the link with burnout. This research identified autonomy as a remedy to the negative affect of unfairness among teachers and professors with regard to commitment attitude. As an expansion to the ERI theory, we discuss the theoretical and practical significance of the stressfulness of effort-reward imbalance at work and its deleterious consequences in terms of commitment, the role of emotional labor, then the impact of at-work autonomy in buffering the exhausting effects of the direct and mediated relations through Emotional Labor.

Keywords:

Unfairness, Effort Reward Imbalance (ERI), Emotional Labor, Autonomy, Burnout (BO), Commitment, Deep Acting, Surface Acting, Emotional Consonance,