The Relationship Between Online Education Pre-school Teachers’ Personality Traits and Job Satisfaction During the COVID-19: The Mediation of Emotional Labour

Online education is an important way to teach students in COVID-19. Online education pre-school teachers as high emotional workers, coupled with the influence of COVID-19, their different emotional labour strategies will have different effects on job satisfaction. Our study investigated the relationship between personality traits, emotional labour and job satisfaction during the COVID-19. A questionnaire survey was administered to 450 pre-school teachers that they worked online at home in China using the Personality Trait Inventory, Emotional Labour Scale and Job Satisfaction Inventory. The results showed that the COVID-19 significantly impacted pre-school teachers' personality traits and emotional labour. First, the Big Five Personalities were significant influences on the emotional labour of pre-school teachers, with openness and agreeableness being strong predictors of surface acting, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion being effective predictors of deep acting, and agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness being effective predictors of natural expression. Among them, the most common type of emotional labour for pre-school teachers was deep acting. Secondly, the greatest influence on job satisfaction was openness and agreeableness in the Big Five Personality dimensions. Their effect sizes on job satisfaction were 0.246 and 0.223, respectively. Nervousness was not significantly related to job satisfaction of pre-school teachers. Finally, the Mediation of deep acting and natural expression were more significant between different personality dimensions and job satisfaction of pre-school teachers.