Teachers' Perceived Interplay Between Emotional Intelligence, School Climate and Burnout: A Mixed-Method Study

Abstract

The conservation of resources (COR) model has accumulated sufficient evidence to explain burnout in a variety of professions, including teachers, based on the relationship between organizational demands and personal resources, and its development from emotional exhaustion, cynicism and decreased self‐actualization, in that order. From a holistic perspective, the purpose of this study was to provide evidence on this relationship in teacher burnout, analyzing the influence of school climate as a demand and emotional intelligence as a resource. The design is cross‐sectional and combines quantitative self‐report data with qualitative focus group data. The analysis comprised fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs/QCA) and thematic analysis, respectively. The results suggest different relationships between school climate and emotional intelligence for each of the dimensions of teacher burnout. These findings emphasize that emotional intelligence and contextual factors can help teachers introduce emotional education in the classroom without being perceived as an overload but as an added resource.