AUTHOR=Wang Kunyan , Huang Tao , Lin Xinyue , Tan Rong 

TITLE=Time poverty and teacher subjective well-being in an accelerated society: a three-wave longitudinal analysis of emotional exhaustion, psychological resilience, and gender

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1728219

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1728219

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=IntroductionTime poverty, driven by social acceleration, is emerging as a critical threat to teacher subjective well-being (SWB). Yet, the causal mechanisms linking time poverty to diminished SWB and the protective factors that might buffer this detrimental process remain empirically underexplored.MethodsTo address this gap, a semester-long survey was conducted with 645 Chinese teachers. Time poverty and psychological resilience were measured at Time 1 (T1), emotional exhaustion at Time 2 (T2), and subjective well-being at Time 3 (T3). Utilizing this three-wave longitudinal data, our study tested a moderated mediation model to examine whether emotional exhaustion mediates the long-term impact of time poverty on teacher SWB and whether this indirect effect is moderated by psychological resilience and gender.ResultsResults demonstrated that emotional exhaustion was a key mediator in the relationship between time poverty and SWB. Furthermore, the analysis uncovered a dual-path moderation: psychological resilience acted as a buffer, effectively weakening the adverse impact of time poverty on emotional exhaustion. In contrast, gender served as an amplifier, exacerbating the detrimental effect of emotional exhaustion on SWB, with female teachers being significantly more vulnerable than their male counterparts.DiscussionThis study concludes that time poverty profoundly harms teacher SWB, not directly, but by depleting their emotional resources. This finding presents a critical empirical challenge to techno-optimistic narratives, revealing structural time pressure as a significant dark side of digital transformation in education. Our results underscore that for educational administrators, moving beyond fostering individual resilience to systemically building gender-sensitive, “time-friendly” school environments are crucial for combating this structural pressure.