Towards a Better Understanding of the Relationships Between Emotional Competencies, Stress, and Burnout: Empirical Validation with Pre-service Teachers

Being a teacher is known to be a stressful job. In Belgium, the attrition rate is close to 25% within the first five years of teaching. This phenomenon causes high psychosocial costs for teachers, and burnout and job-related stress are key determinants of attrition. Research showed that better emotional competencies help teachers to manage their occupational stress. However, most of the studies focused on in-service teachers while targeting emotional competencies and psychological distress within the pre-service teachers could help them to prepare for the reality of the profession. Thus, this study investigates the relationships between emotional competencies and psychological distress among pre-service elementary school teachers. Data collection took place between December 2021 and February 2022. We measured emotional competencies (Profile of Emotional Competencies), stress (Perceived Stress Scale), and burnout (Maslach Burnout Inventory). We found a significant indirect effect of stress between understanding our own’s emotions and the three dimensions of burnout. Moreover, emotional regulation predicts emotional exhaustion when controlling for other emotional competencies, gender and stress. These results emphasize the benefice of implementing emotional competencies training in initial teacher education.