Transformational teachership: how principles of transformational leadership foster student outcomes

Abstract

As higher education continues to undergo reform, the role of teachers as leaders in the classroom is becoming more important than ever. However, there is a relative dearth of information regarding the operationalizing of transformational leader behaviors and understanding the theoretical mechanisms that explain how transformational leadership facilitates positive outcomes for followers. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to create and test specific behaviors of transformational teachers, as well as to propose a new model of transformational teachership that explains how transformational teachers facilitate followers' experience of three psychological states, perceived meaningfulness, psychological safety, and self-efficacy, which in turn influences student outcomes, including student engagement, satisfaction, effort, and performance. Using an experimental design with 541 undergraduate students and 3 graduate student instructors, the results of this study demonstrated an observed difference in student observations of transformational leadership behaviors (at Time 1 and Time 2), as well as students in the experimental condition performing significantly better than students in the control condition. Results for the proposed psychological states that mediate the relationship between transformational teachership and students outcomes were mixed. In this study, perceived psychological meaning was strongly supported as a mediating variable, but psychological safety and academic self-efficacy were not.