Organizational leadership, teacher work conditions and teachers' job satisfaction: A multi-country analysis

The notion that principals' actions create distinct working environments in schools and that these environments are associated with teacher satisfaction is well established in the United States (Johnson, Kraft & Papay, 2011; Moore, 2012; Grissom, 2011). As part of the process of creating a supportive work environment principals may also take steps to establish a culture of collaboration among teachers. Notably however, multi-country analysis examining principal leadership and teacher satisfaction is limited and a specific focus on Asia is missing from the existing literature on the subject. Similarly, the relationships between teacher collaboration, principal leadership and teacher satisfaction across varying social, cultural, and economic contexts are understudied. This dissertation consisting of three interrelated papers is a systematic effort to address this gap in the literature. Chapter 1 in this dissertation is an extensive analytic review of teacher work conditions associated with teacher satisfaction within the United States and internationally. This chapter is foundational because it identifies gaps in the literature on teacher satisfaction. Based on this analytic review I focus on two relational and policy amenable organizational factors---principal leadership and teacher collaboration in the two chapters that follow.;Chapter 2 explores the association between principal leadership style and teachers' job satisfaction in six Asian countries---Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Taiwan, and Thailand, as well as the United States. I use a large-scale international dataset---the Trends in International Math and Science (TIMSS) 2007, which are the only large-scale secondary data publicly available that represent several countries in Asia and specifically pertain to education. Additionally, TIMSS 2007 contain a comprehensive set of demographic and contextual variables that enable a rich analysis of the relationships of interest. Results indicate that two aspects of transformational leadership are significantly associated with principal reported teacher satisfaction across all the countries analyzed. These are identified as the principal's role in building a shared vision and mission for the school, which Leithwood and Sun (2012) name "setting directions" and the principal's role in capacity building within schools which they name "developing people.".;Chapter 3 focuses on teacher collaboration in five OECD countries---Denmark, Poland, Brazil, Mexico and Hungary using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2008). A fractional response model is used to explore the association between factors measuring transformational leadership in these countries and a summative index of teacher collaboration. I also deconstruct the relationship between the leadership factors and twelve individual measures of teacher collaboration. Results indicate a predominantly positive association between factors measuring transformational leadership and individual measures of collaboration pertaining to classroom teaching and learning. Additionally, I find that in all five countries there is a strong positive association between the index of teacher collaboration and teachers' job satisfaction.;Thus, cumulatively the two large-scale data sets used in this dissertation---(TIMSS 2007 and TALIS 2008) generate a more comprehensive understanding of how particular aspects of teacher work conditions---principal leadership and teacher collaboration are associated with variations in teacher satisfaction in a multi-country context.