Abstract:

Professional burnout is defined as a state of emotional exhaustion that can affect teachers due to the workload, stress, and demands of their profession. Burnout syndrome is an individual experience characterized by three phases: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment. Numerous studies worldwide report that high levels of experienced burnout negatively affects students’ outcomes and teaching quality and can lead to dissatisfaction, a lack of commitment to work, and intentional teacher turnover. At the same time, burnout negatively affects teacher-student interpersonal relations. An adequate response to this problem implies an assessment of certain emotional competencies that will allow us to distinguish those teachers whose competencies are lower or insufficient to deal with burnout. It has been established that such emotional competencies as emotional intelligence and sense of humor are related to the personal experience of burnout and have significance for its reduction. Emotional intelligence is an important factor for school and university teachers and because of its implications on their performance, and communication in school setting. Research on the topic reveals that emotional intelligence: facilitates teachers’ empathy and understanding for their students; promotes effective communication with others, clear expression of their thoughts and feelings; promotes conflict management; establishes supportive classroom environment and fosters learning process, thus encouraging students to achieve better results. At the same time, it is established that humor can be an effective means of preventing and dealing with burnout. Incorporating humor into everyday life and the work environment can help teachers cope with stress and protect themselves from emotional exhaustion by improving mood, increasing mental well-being, strengthening social relations, and reducing conflict situations. The main goal of the study is to outline personal strategies for professional burnout regulation by revealing the role of emotional intelligence and the styles of humor used among teachers and professors. This is supposed to give robust findings aimed at better emotional competence research and practical implications for teachers and is dictated by the growing disturbing trend of increasing number of teachers experiencing burnout. A convenient sample, comprising 387 teachers aged 22 to 60 was administered a questionnaire for professional burnout among teachers (Maslach Burnout Inventory—Educators Survey); Emotional Intelligence as a Personality Trait Questionnaire – Short Version (TEIQue – SF); Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). The results reveal correlations among burnout, EI and styles of humor. Emotional intelligence is negatively related with emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and positively with low work ability. It was further reported a negative relationship between adaptive humor styles and levels of professional burnout and a positive relationship between maladaptive humor styles and depersonalization. At the same time, the results of multiple linear regressions confirm the influence of emotional intelligence on the three levels of professional burnout. These results suggest that developing emotional competencies can help teachers and educators better understand and support their students by creating a supportive and inspiring learning environment.

Keywords:

Burnout syndrome, emotional intelligence, development of emotional competences, humor, styles of humor.