In brief
This doctoral study combined a survey of 804 primary and lower secondary teachers in the province of Kütahya with interviews with 15 of them. Teachers who reported that their principals delegated authority and supported them, and who drew more intrinsic satisfaction from their work, reported higher well-being. The interviews add a less comfortable picture: high satisfaction scores coexisted with pressure from parents, crowded classrooms, heavy and unevenly shared duties, and principals who became defensive and bureaucratic when problems arose.
Research problem and aims
Teacher well-being has become a policy concern in many countries, but in Turkey research has tended to examine leadership, satisfaction and well-being in separate studies. The thesis asks whether principals’ empowering leadership and teachers’ job satisfaction predict teachers’ subjective well-being once individual and school characteristics are taken into account, and how teachers themselves describe these relationships.
Conceptual framework
Empowering leadership is defined, following Konczak, Stelly and Trusty (2000), as leadership that strengthens employees’ sense of meaning, competence, autonomy and impact; the study measures three of its dimensions: delegation of authority, responsibility and support. Teacher subjective well-being is defined as teachers’ perception of healthy and successful functioning at work, with two dimensions, school connectedness and teaching efficacy. Job satisfaction is measured through intrinsic satisfaction on the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire.
Method
The study used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. In the quantitative phase, the author visited 104 primary and lower secondary schools in Kütahya whose principals had been in post for at least a year, during the 2023–24 school year, and collected 804 usable questionnaires from teachers who volunteered. Instruments were a teacher well-being scale, an empowering leadership scale and the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. Analyses included multiple regression and four-step hierarchical regression, entering individual characteristics, school characteristics, intrinsic satisfaction and then the dimensions of empowering leadership, with a Bonferroni correction for significance tests. In the qualitative phase, 15 teachers chosen by criterion sampling were interviewed face to face, and the data were analysed thematically.
Key findings
Teachers reported high well-being (mean 3.42 on a four-point scale), high intrinsic satisfaction (4.18 on five) and frequent empowering behaviour by their principals (4.37 on five), with delegation of authority rated highest and support lowest.
The three dimensions of empowering leadership together explained about 17% of the variance in teachers’ intrinsic satisfaction (R² = .167), with support the strongest predictor (β = .25).
For school connectedness, individual and school characteristics explained almost nothing. Intrinsic satisfaction raised the explained variance to 14%, and adding empowering leadership raised it to 30%. In the final model, delegation of authority (β = .29), intrinsic satisfaction (β = .20) and support (β = .17) were significant predictors, while responsibility was not. For teaching efficacy, the final model explained 27% of the variance; the author’s summary identifies delegation of authority and intrinsic satisfaction as its significant predictors.
The interviews suggested that teachers’ satisfaction rests mainly on intrinsic sources, such as love of the profession and students’ progress, while external factors, including parental pressure, overcrowded classrooms, complaints filed through the state’s online petition system and bureaucratic obstacles, threaten it. Teachers described principals as willing to delegate in pedagogical and classroom matters but as defensive, bureaucratic and centralising in risky situations that affected the school as an institution. Loading extra tasks onto the most active teachers was seen not as empowerment but as drudgery that undermined their sense of fairness. The author argues that teachers maintain their well-being through their attachment to the profession and their students despite these pressures, but that this resilience weakens with age and seniority.
Limitations and implications
The author notes that the study is limited to primary and lower secondary teachers in Kütahya who volunteered to take part, that its cross-sectional design reflects the situation at one point in time rather than cause and effect, and that self-report data carry risks of social desirability and common-method bias. The author recommends that principals stand by teachers in moments of risk, distribute duties fairly and avoid management practices that turn schools into “centres of statistics and scores”, and that researchers develop measures of empowering leadership suited to the Turkish context.
Why it matters internationally
The study shows how a mixed-methods design can qualify reassuringly high survey scores. Its central quantitative finding, that delegation and support from the principal are associated with teachers’ attachment to their school, fits the international literature on leadership and teacher well-being. Its interview findings point to a form of selective empowerment that may be common in centralised systems: principals share decisions about teaching but retreat into bureaucratic caution when accountability pressures rise. Our page on teacher burnout discusses the wider research on teachers’ working conditions.