Linking distributed leadership to teacher job satisfaction in China: Mediating roles of teacher well-being and work motivation

With the increasing complexity in schools, there is a growing interest in distributed leadership as a potential response to the challenges faced by centralized leadership. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of distributed leadership by examining its impact on teacher job satisfaction and the mediating effects of teacher well-being and work motivation, using hierarchical linear modeling. Data were obtained from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey, which included 3716 teachers from 193 Chinese lower secondary schools. Results show that distributed leadership has direct and indirect impacts on teacher job satisfaction, with teacher well-being and work motivation serving as partial mediators. The strongest indirect path in the model is the one from distributed leadership via well-being to teacher job satisfaction; further analyses show that well-being also has the strongest direct and total impacts on satisfaction. These findings extend prior research by more fully revealing how leadership behaviors and teachers' psychological processes interact to shape teacher job satisfaction.