The purpose of this study was to examine the relations among early childhood teacher’s burnout, emotional labor and collective self-esteem and the mediating effect of collective self-esteem between early childhood teachers’ emotional labor and burnout.
The data were collected from 361 early childhood teachers who are working at kindergartens and daycare centers located in Daegu Metropolitan City and Kyeongsangbub-do area. A questionnaire consists of The Early Childhood Teachers Burnout Scale(Kim, Y. O., Chan, S. M., & Lee, J. H., 2012), and The Korean Collective Self-esteem Scale(KSCSE:　Kim, H. S., 1993) and some basic socio-demographic questions were included. The analysis was performed by descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation coefficients and hierarchical multiple regression with SPSS 19.0 program. Also, the Sobel test was used to verify the mediation effect.

The results of this study are as follows:

First, there is no significant difference on early childhood teachers’ burnout according to the general background such as age, level of education, work experience, type of early childhood institute, and age of children in a classroom.
Second, surface acting of emotional labor showed significant positive effects on early childhood teacher’s burnout, and deep acting of emotional labor showed significant negative effects on early childhood teacher’s burnout and positive effects on collective self-esteem.
Finally, collective self-esteem　had a full mediating effect between deep acting and early childhood teacher’s burnout.
The findings show that the relationship between early childhood teachers’ emotional labor, especially deep acting, and burnout can be better understood as being mediated by collective self-esteem rather than direct.