Positive emotional demands and psychological distance between teachers and students affect teachers' work engagement in universities

High-quality higher education requires greater work engagement (WE) from university faculty. This paper uses the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and Construal Level Theory (CLT) to investigate the influences of positive emotional demands (PED) and teacher-student psychological distance(T-SPD) on WE and the mediating role of emotional labor (EL). A questionnaire survey involving 316 Chinese college and university teachers was carried out to explore the impacts of these factors on teachers' WE. The findings showed that (1) PED and T-S PD all have a beneficial effect on WE; (2) PED had positive relationships with surface acting (SA), deep acting (DA), and naturally felt emotion (NFE); (3) T-SPD had negative correlation with SA and positive correlation with DA and NFE; (4) DA and NFE play a partial mediating role between PED, T-SPD, and WE, whereas SA does not mediate these relationships. These findings enrich the theoretical model of university teachers' WE and offer practical recommendations for enhancing WE among Chinese university educators.