Search results

The purpose of this paper is to test an innovative model for exploring the direct and indirect relationships between principals’ cognitive complexity (CC), schools’ absorptive capacity (ACAP), a teacher’s affective commitment and a teacher’s intent to leave.

Data were collected from a survey of 1,664 teachers at 107 Arab elementary schools, randomly selected from the database of the Israeli educational system. To test the proposed model, multilevel structural equation modeling was conducted.

The analysis confirmed that schools’ ACAP and a teacher’s affective commitment are prominent mediators between principals’ CC and a teacher’s intent to leave.

Understanding the factors that contribute to a teacher’s intent to leave could help school principals and policy makers retain effective teachers in today’s schools.

This study adds to the body of research directed at identifying school principals’ characteristics, as well as work-related factors, which may decrease a teacher’s intent to leave and are amenable to leadership intervention.

The study aims to test an innovative model that explores the direct and indirect relationships between principals' innovative behavior, climate of organizational learning and a teacher's intent to leave his or her school and take a voluntary absence.

Data were collected from a survey of 1,529 teachers from 107 Arab elementary schools randomly selected from the database of the Israeli educational system. To test the proposed multilevel model, we conducted multilevel structural equation modeling (ML-SEM).

The analysis confirmed that organizational learning climate is a prominent mediator between principals' innovative behavior and a teacher's intent to leave and his/her voluntary absence.

This research advances our understanding of leaders' innovative construct in an educational context and adds to the body of research directed at identifying administrative support and work-related factors that may negatively relate to a teacher's absenteeism or intent to leave and are amenable to leadership intervention.

This conceptual paper explores a novel model explaining teachers' perceptions of their effective leader through the lens of implicit leadership theory (ILT), using the concepts of school principals' sense-making and cognitive complexity (CC).

The sense-making framework and CC theory were used to explain ILT, which focuses on individuals' perceptions of leaders' prototypical and anti-prototypical attributes.

The theoretical model suggests that school principals as sense-makers with high levels of CC will be perceived by teachers as effective in terms of leadership prototypes, whereas teachers' perceptions of principals with low levels of CC will be related to leadership anti-prototypes.

This paper suggests a model for a multidimensional understanding of the relationship between principals' sense-making and CC and their influence on teachers' perceptions of an effective leader.

Opening avenues for future research into employee perceptions of different leadership characteristics, this model emphasizes the cognitive aspects of school principals within implicit leadership theories. This theoretical model should be further examined empirically, and other types of CC, such as social and behavioral aspects, or affective complexity and self-complexity, should be considered.

Collective teacher efficacy (CTE) is a promising construct for understanding how schools can foster student achievement. Although much of the early research on CTE took place in North America, researchers from other parts of the world are now delving into this topic. The current study explores whether these powerful collective beliefs function similarly across diverse cultural and linguistic groups: Arab and Jewish teachers in Israel, and teachers in Turkey and the USA.

Participants included 4,216 teachers from Israel, Turkey and the USA, representing four cultures: Arab, Jewish, Turkish and American. We tested configural invariance using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (AMOS) and alignment optimization (Mplus) to identify the groups in which specific parameters are noninvariant, and to compare the latent factor means.

Configural invariance showed adequate fit of the model structure across the four groups. Based on invariance tests, using the alignment optimization method, CTE scales held different meanings for specific items across the four cultures, where the USA and Arab cultures were the sources of these differences. Furthermore, in comparing the two-dimensional CTE belief scale across the four groups, latent means revealed the highest mean ranking for the USA and the lowest for Turkey.

This research makes a significant theoretical contribution by examining and comparing the concept of teachers' collective efficacy in multiple cultures. This comparison can also contribute to instructional teaching practices worldwide.

The article aims to investigate the relationships between different dimensions of organizational ethics and different withdrawal symptoms – lateness, absence, and intent to leave work.

Participants were 1,016 school teachers from 35 high schools in Israel. A joint model of Glimmix procedure of SAS was used for this analysis, which simultaneously measures lateness using the negative binomial distribution, absence using the Poisson distribution, and intent to leave using the normal distribution.

Findings indicate that the different dimensions of organizational ethics were related to one another. Formal climate and distributive justice were found to be negatively related to lateness, while a caring climate was found to be negatively related to absence frequency, and procedural justice was found to be negatively related to intent to leave. The results indicate certain differences between ethical predictors, which may arise from extrinsic motivation factors and those that may arise from intrinsic motivation factors. As regards socio‐demographic predictors, women teachers exhibit more absence and less intent to leave than men. Teachers with high seniority at their school prefer to respond with absence and a reduced intent to leave, and as the teacher's age rises, the lower are lateness and absence frequency.

School leadership should develop an integrative approach which includes ethics and socio‐demographic factors in order to reduce teachers' withdrawal behaviors. Such an approach may be achieved through training programs, developing clear rules, incentives and delegation of power.

The results offer an integrative framework by simultaneously considering various aspects of ethics, withdrawal behaviors, and socio‐demographic predictors.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mediating role of workplace attitudes: professional identity and career aspirations between perceptions of principals’ authentic leadership and teacher behaviors: intent to leave, organizational citizenship behavior, counterproductive work behavior, lateness and intention to leave among teachers.

The sample was composed of 605 teachers, randomly selected, nested in 41 Israeli elementary, junior high and high schools. Data analysis was based on multi-level structural equations.

The findings indicated that the more the school was perceived by the teachers as having an authentic leader, the professional identity of the teachers was higher and was negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward colleagues in the school, while the teachers’ career aspirations were higher and negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward the organization.

This study shows the importance of teachers’ individual and collective perceptions and their impacts on teacher behaviors. The practical contribution may include encouraging principals to promote high standards of authentic leadership, to raise teachers’ professional identity and their career aspirations and reduce teachers’ counterproductive work behavior and intention to leave.

The actions of school leaders engender working conditions that can play a role in positively (or negatively) affecting teachers’ motivation, well-being or professional practice. The purpose of this paper is to explore how leader actions might bring about positive teacher outcomes through meeting teachers’ psychological needs at three distinct levels: the intrapersonal, interpersonal and organizational.

Using a sample of over 1,500 teachers from 73 schools in a large, high-poverty, urban Midwestern school district, the authors applied a multilevel path analysis to the study of the relationships between the intrapersonal, interpersonal and organizational dimensions of teacher psychological needs and the teacher affective states of burnout, organizational commitment and intent to leave the school and/or profession.

Whereas the intrapersonal dimension works primarily through burnout, the findings suggest that the interpersonal dimension (teacher–principal interactions) primarily functions to cultivate organizational commitment among teachers. At the organizational level, cultivating a trusting, enabling work environment where teachers can build on existing knowledge and skills had a demonstrated relationship to collective teacher burnout and organizational commitment, but only to the degree that these actions serve to build collective teacher efficacy.

In addressing existing deficits in support for teachers’ psychological needs within a school, school leaders have a significant mechanism through which to affect the attitudes and emotions of teachers which precede turnover behavior. However, addressing teacher psychological needs should be thought of as multidimensional – no single dimension (either the intrapersonal, interpersonal or organizational) alone will be sufficient. Principals should expect to work both one-on-one as well as collectively with teachers to address school working conditions which support their psychological needs as learners.

Prior studies examining the various working conditions of schools have included many common constructs, but the authors demonstrate how self-determination theory could be used to unify these seemingly unique characteristics of school working conditions with respect to how they support (or thwart) the psychological needs of teachers. The authors also empirically test the relationship of these dimensions to a wide-range of commonly-used teacher affective outcomes.

Teachers leave the profession for various reasons, such as inadequate pay, work demands, and lack of support from their administrative leaders. Hargreaves (2004) attributed the growing teacher burnout phenomenon to accountability pressures in the forms of high-stakes testing and increasing work demands. This stress can result in teacher's low self-efficacy and the perception of workplace alienation. Seyfarth (2008) described an alienated teacher with the “feeling that one's work is meaningless and that one is powerless to bring about change” (p. 198). Administrative leadership can further inhibit a teacher's professional growth by failing to meet the teacher's needs with respect to instructional coaching and lacking opportunities for professional self-reflection.

This article, the first empirical study of its kind, presents findings from a larger qualitative study of principal mistreatment of teachers. A grounded theory method was used to study a sample of 50 US teachers who were subjected to long‐term mistreatment from school principals. The authors discuss descriptive, conceptual, and theoretical findings about principals’ actions that teachers define as mistreatment. In addition, the inductively derived model briefly looks at the harmful effects of principal mistreatment and abuse on teachers, psychologically/emotionally and physically/physiologically. Implications of study findings are discussed for administrator and teacher preparation, for school district offices, and for further research.

During the months leading up to and immediately following President Donald Trump’s election, the unique intersection of classroom academic freedom and teacher and students’ first amendment rights would be duly tested, as headlines reminded citizens, parents, and pundits that the reach of raw emotions and political viewpoints did not stop at the schoolhouse door. School and classroom-based events would eventually test the norms of community, the interpretation of legal precedents, the resolve of district and school leadership, and the rights or limits thereof of the teachers themselves. This analysis is grounded on case studies of eight such incidents, all of which occurred at the high school level in public school districts. These eight cases are analyzed in terms of the incidents, the teacher’s actions or speech, the consequences, the relevant legal precedents surrounding academic freedom, the parental, student, and community reaction, and the short- and long-term impacts moving forward.