Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic has inevitably increased teachers’ responsibilities, leading to increased job dissatisfaction, especially among vocational school instructors. Another possible cause is abusive workplace management. Previous studies on abusive supervision in the workplace emphasized job performance, organizational citizenship behavior, employee turnover rate, and burnout as major factors. There has been little research on emotion management techniques as a moderating variable. The purpose of this research is to investigate and validate the role of emotion management techniques in bridging the gap between abusive supervision and teacher job satisfaction. Surveying a total of 255 teacher participants from 7 vocational schools in Yunnan Province in southwest China, the present study has found that abusive leadership is negatively correlated with teacher job satisfaction. As the degree of abusive leadership increases, teacher job satisfaction decreases. Additionally, self-regulation strategies are positively correlated with teacher job satisfaction. Specifically, the stronger the self-regulation ability, the higher the level of teacher job satisfaction. Self-regulation plays a mediating role between abusive leadership and teacher job satisfaction. Teachers with strong self-regulation abilities are less influenced by abusive leadership and have higher levels of work motivation. The result indicates that higher institutions should consider incorporating emotional self-regulatory strategies into teacher training programs. Improving teachers’ ability to regulate their emotions may help mitigate the negative impact of abusive leadership on teacher job satisfaction and consequently lead to an overall increase in job satisfaction among teachers.