Page 93 - Educational Leadership in a Changing World

Linking School Principals’ Leadership Styles

concept of leadership of managers includes both school principals and
deputy principals, but when searching for one or another phrase, often
not all results are included due to the mismatch of keywords used in
published articles; therefore, only the concept of leadership was used
in order to increase the chances of finding suitable publications. Third,
the search was carried out including the field of education science and,
having noticed that including the field of psychology on the origins of
well-being results in more relevant publications, this was also selected.
However, other areas of social science were not selected for review, in
which articles that met the criteria could potentially be found. Fourth,
empirical studies were selected only during the second stage of applying
the inclusion and exclusion criteria while it could have been reviewed in
the first stage. However, this did not affect the final result of the study.

Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review study-
ing the links between leadership styles applied by school principals and
teachers’ professional well-being. Therefore, the study included all sci-
entific sources in the Scopus database and articles selected according to
the criteria to confirm the relevance of the topic, with 94 of these pub-
lished in 2020–2024. Also, based on the number of studies conducted,
the greatest relevance of the topic is observed in Asian countries (Eyal
& Roth, 2011; Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021; Abdulaziz Alfayez et al., 2021;
Attar et al., 2023; Xu & Yang, 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Mendoza & Dizon,
2024; Li et al., 2024), so the lower number of publications in Western
countries indicates the lack of research on the topic and the need for
further research. It has been revealed that many authors conduct quan-
titative research (Eyal & Roth, 2011; Van der Vyver et al., 2020; Abdu-
laziz Alfayez et al., 2021; Shie & Chang, 2022; Collie, 2023; Attar et al.,
2023; Xu & Yang, 2023; Liu et al., 2023; Limon et al., 2023; Quinteros-
Durand et al., 2023; Lee & Swaner, 2023; Mendoza & Dizon, 2024; Li et
al., 2024; Bellibaş et al., 2024), while very rarely conducting qualitative
(Buskila & Chen-Levi, 2021) and mixed studies (Cann et al., 2021; But-
ler, 2024). The analysis showed a lack of qualitative and mixed studies
investigating the links between principals’ leadership styles and teach-
ers’ professional well-being. Qualitative studies would reveal the links
and their causality in more depth. The analysed articles revealed con-
nections, but did not provide extensive information about their causal-
ity and ongoing consequences.

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