付出-回报失衡与边境地区体育教师情绪耗竭：意义工作与社会支持的作用

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Health Psychology

Abstract

Emotional exhaustion has become a prevalent psychological concern among teachers working in high-demand educational environments. Drawing upon effort–reward imbalance (ERI) theory and conservation of resources theory, this study examined the relationship between ERI and emotional exhaustion among teachers working in border regions of China, with meaningful work as a mediator and social support as a moderator. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 483 primary and secondary school teachers. Data were analyzed using PROCESS Models 4 and 14 with 5,000 bootstrap resamples. The results indicated that ERI was positively associated with emotional exhaustion. Meaningful work accounted for a significant indirect association between ERI and emotional exhaustion. In addition, social support moderated the association between meaningful work and emotional exhaustion, such that the positive association was weaker at higher levels of social support. The conditional indirect association between ERI and emotional exhaustion through meaningful work was also smaller at higher levels of social support. These findings highlight the complex psychological role of meaningful work under chronically demanding work conditions and emphasize the importance of supportive school environments for maintaining teachers' psychological well-being.

Keywords

Effort–reward imbalance, Emotional exhaustion, Meaningful work, Physical education teachers, social support

Received

16 May 2026

Accepted

31 August 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Bao, Sun, Yue, Dong and Yan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Changliang Yan

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All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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