Teachers’ and principals’ perceptions of school climate: the role of principals’ leadership style in organizational quality

In this paper, we report on teachers’ and principals’ shared perceptions regarding beliefs, rules, trust, and encouragement of new initiatives. Collectively, these are aspects of leadership for learning (LFL) describing an overall shared climate in schools. We demonstrate how these perceptions on school climate differ across teachers and principals within and across countries. Moreover, we report how different perceptions of school climate are associated with leadership style. We analyze data from 37 countries that participated in the last cycle of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) in 2018. To build the measurement model, we employ multigroup multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, whereas multivariate linear regression is used to inspect associations. Overall, principals and teachers differ in their views of school climate. In the majority of the countries, principals report stronger school climate than teachers. We further confirm these perceptual differences between teachers and principals by separately studying the relationships between teacher perceived school climate and principal perceived school climate with relevant leadership variables. In the entire sample, we find that principals’ perceptions of school climate are more strongly and consistently associated with leadership in schools. This relationship is particularly stable for distributed leadership. In the entire sample, leadership styles are weakly positively correlated with teacher perceptions of school climate too; however, this association is less pronounced and less stable within individual countries. The analyses conducted within countries revealed that the distributed leadership rather than instructional leadership shapes teachers’ perceptions of school climate. More discussion is presented on the need for alignment between different perceptions of school climate and leadership styles in the overall organizational quality.