The main purpose of this research is to examine what Turkish elementary school teachers do when displaying emotional labor based on their own statements. Emotional labor can be defined as employee’s displaying expected emotions by the organization during service encounters (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). According to emotional labor theory, organizations determine feeling rules in order to express emotions in the right way. It is expected from employee to obey this rules disregarding what he/she really feel (Diefenndorff, Croyle & Gosserand, 2005). According to Hochschild (1979), a sociologist who defined the term first, managing emotions in such a way is a kind of work. There are three ways or strategies of performing emotional labor. These are (1) deep acting, (2) surface acting and (3) displaying genuine emotions. Employee tries to modify his/her inner feelings in order to display expected emotions when performing deep acting (Grandey, 2003). On the other hand, in surface acting, employee fakes the expected emotions for the same purpose (Diefendorff et. al. 2005). Genuine emotions mean displaying inner feelings in line with organization’s expectations (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993).

Teaching is a profession requiring high levels of emotional labor (Hochschild, 1979; Zembylas, 2004; Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006). Teachers are expected to maintain positive relationships with students (Kaliska, 2002) and to display positive emotions towards them (Guy & Newman, 2004). Teachers sometimes may extremely praise students for good answers, while sometimes may they unexpectedly give an impression of calm when confronted with a disruptive student. Teachers are performing emotional labor in such situations (Bellas, 1999; Naring et al., 2006). It is possible to assert that the emotional labor will vary across the situation, the environment of the school, characteristics of students and teachers and so forth. The school type as public and private is also taught as a factor effecting or varying the performed emotional labor.

In the light of discussions above determining behavioral patterns of Turkish public and private elementary school teachers is taught to be a considerable contribution to related literature. With this purpose the researcher looked for answers to the following questions: In public and private schools; (1) Are there feeling rules in relationships with students? If yes, what are the examples? (2) What kind of difficulties are teachers experiencing while trying to obey these feeling rules? (3) What are the behavioral patterns exemplifying deep acting strategy? (4) What are the behavioral patterns exemplifying surface acting strategy? (5) What are the behavioral patterns exemplifying displaying genuine emotions?

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