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

Introduction: Time 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. Methods: To 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. Results: Results 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. Discussion: This 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.