School principals versus teachers’ expectations: the interplay between school leadership and teachers’ job satisfaction in rural Tanzania

Employees’ job satisfaction is critical for bettering work performance, reducing turnover intention, enhancing organizational commitment, and decreasing job burnout. Even though many studies have examined the relationship between leadership and employees’ job satisfaction in different sectors (and largely quantitatively), such studies did not specifically address the role of school principals in meeting teachers’ expectations as a strategy of augmenting job satisfaction for classroom teachers. Thus, the present study aimed to establish how the primary school headteachers influenced teachers' job satisfaction by meeting their job expectations in rural Tanzania. Employing a mixed-method approach and specifically the convergent parallel research design, the study used face-to-face interviews, Focus Group discussions and surveys, to collect data from a purposively selected sample of school headteachers (N = 82) and randomly selected teachers (N = 264), hence a cumulative sample of 346. Quantitative data were descriptively analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 25 whereas qualitative data were subjected to Thematic Analysis. The results indicate that headteachers attempted to meet teachers' job satisfaction by creating a conducive and supportive work environment, facilitating the teachers’ continuous professional development, and offering them the much-needed feedback regarding their job performances. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.