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Past research has generally purported and tested for a positive linear relationship between psychological capital and organizational outcomes such as firm performance. Yet, recent conceptual work has started to recognize that for certain outcomes, too much psychological capital can be as detrimental as too little. In this study, the author hypothesizes that during a major crisis, organizational psychological capital (OPsyCap) may in fact exhibit an inverted U-shaped relationship with performance.

T leverages the revelatory power of a recent major crisis (the COVID-19 pandemic) to gather a pre-crisis and post-crisis matching sample of 952 earnings conference calls held by 476 S&P 500 firms with corresponding market performance data and use computer-assisted text analysis (CATA) methodology to assess OPsyCap from call transcripts.

T finds that OPsyCap has a statistically significant inverted U-shaped relationship with market performance after the crisis, but not prior—thereby suggesting that moderate OPsyCap is more beneficial to market performance than either insufficient or excessive OPsyCap in times of crisis.

Top managers should not display overly excessive psychological capital after a major crisis, as shareholders may interpret such cues as unwarranted optimism, overconfidence and an inability to accept the new reality brought about by the crisis.

This study's findings contribute to extant literature by being the first to empirically highlight a curvilinear relationship between psychological capital and an important outcome variable—market performance. Furthermore, this study's lack of results prior to a major crisis, but not after, may suggest a new boundary condition.

Leadership for learning emerged as an integrated leadership framework; however, attempts to establish an empirical measurement model have been limited. Critically, not much is known about how much teachers' beliefs (e.g. self-efficacy) can mediate leadership for learning impact on teacher behaviors. This study establishes a leadership for learning measurement model and examines whether teacher self-efficacy mediates the effect of leadership for learning tasks on teacher collaboration, instructional quality, intention to leave current schools and their confidence in equitable teaching practice.

Drawing on the most recent 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), the study employed a structural equation modeling mediation approach.

Results suggested that teacher self-efficacy statistically significantly mediated 16 out of 20 of the relationships between leadership for learning task domains and teacher outcomes. Especially, in explaining the variance in instructional quality and teacher confidence in implementing equitable teaching practices, considerable proportions of the predictive power of leadership for learning tasks were accounted for (i.e. mediated) by teacher self-efficacy.

School-wide efforts to craft the school vision for learning must be coupled with enhancing teacher self-efficacy. Critically, leadership efforts may fall short of implementing equitable teaching practice and quality instruction without addressing teacher confidence in their ability in instruction, classroom management and student engagement.

This study is the first of its kind to evidence teacher self-efficacy mediates leadership for learning practice impact on teacher behaviors.