In brief
This doctoral study surveyed 470 teachers in primary, lower secondary and upper secondary schools in the province of Kastamonu. It found that teachers who rated their principals higher on instructional leadership also reported higher work engagement, but that most of this association ran indirectly, through teachers’ sense of self-efficacy and their collaboration with colleagues, rather than directly from the principal.
Research problem and aims
Instructional leadership has been studied extensively in relation to student achievement, but less is known about how it relates to teachers’ own engagement with their work. The thesis asks whether principals’ instructional leadership, as perceived by teachers, is associated with teachers’ work engagement, and whether teacher self-efficacy and teacher collaboration mediate that relationship. It also compares the levels of these variables by teachers’ gender and career title.
Conceptual framework
The study borrows the Job Demands-Resources model from organisational psychology and applies it to schools. In this view, a principal who supports teaching acts as a job resource, and self-efficacy and collaboration act as personal and social resources that sustain engagement, which the author defines through the Utrecht tradition of vigour, dedication and absorption. Instructional leadership is framed through Hallinger’s model. See our page on instructional leadership.
Method
The design is correlational. The population was 3,606 teachers working in public schools in Kastamonu during 2023–24; a minimum sample of 348 was calculated and distributed across districts in proportion to their teacher numbers, and 470 teachers took part. Of these, 246 were women and 224 men; 150 held the career title of teacher, 270 expert teacher and 50 head teacher. The instruments were the short form of the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale, the short form of the Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale, the collaboration dimension of a teacher professional learning scale, and the Turkish short form of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale. Data were analysed with correlation and regression analysis and with path analysis in structural equation modelling, using 5,000 bootstrap samples to test indirect effects.
Key findings
All main variables were positively correlated. Work engagement correlated most strongly with self-efficacy (r = .52), followed by collaboration (r = .41) and instructional leadership (r = .36). Among the dimensions of instructional leadership, school climate had the strongest correlation with engagement (r = .35), while defining the school mission had the weakest (r = .31). In the regression analyses, the mission and curriculum dimensions of instructional leadership and the classroom management dimension of self-efficacy did not predict engagement once other variables were taken into account.
The path model fitted the data well (CFI = .98, RMSEA = .06). Instructional leadership had a small direct association with work engagement (β = .11) and a larger indirect association through self-efficacy and collaboration (β = .26), giving a total of .37. Self-efficacy had the strongest direct association with engagement (β = .45), and collaboration a smaller one (β = .12). The author therefore concludes that self-efficacy and collaboration partially mediate the link between instructional leadership and engagement.
Teachers reported very high levels of engagement and collaboration and high levels of instructional leadership and self-efficacy. Teachers holding the head teacher title reported higher self-efficacy and engagement than other teachers, and women reported higher collaboration than men.
Limitations and implications
The author notes that the study is limited to teachers in one province in a single school year, relies on self-report data collected at one point in time, and does not consider other variables that may be related. Because the data are cross-sectional, the “effects” estimated by the path model are statistical associations rather than evidence of causation. The author recommends that principals invest in conditions that strengthen teachers’ confidence and collaboration, since this appears to be the main route through which their instructional leadership is linked to engagement.
Why it matters internationally
The finding that a principal’s influence on teachers runs mainly through teachers’ own resources echoes international research describing leadership effects as largely indirect, and it adds evidence from a centralised system in which principals have limited formal control over staffing and curriculum. The study is also an example of a growing strand of Turkish research that applies the Job Demands-Resources model to schools, a framework more often used in research on teacher burnout.