School Leadership Types and Teacher Job Satisfaction: A Meta-Analytic Review

While research on the association between various school leadership styles and teachers’ job satisfaction has gained momentum, a gap remains in understanding the strengths of these relationships across different leadership styles. This research employed a random-effects model and examined the moderator role of leadership type through meta-regression to explore the comparative relationship between several school leadership styles and teachers’ job satisfaction. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to assess the significance of the variations in effect sizes between school leadership styles and teachers’ job satisfaction. A total of 39 research articles, encompassing 170,693 participants, were included in the analysis. Findings indicated a statistically significant high correlation for distributed, transformational, servant, and empowering leadership styles and no association for transactional leadership. The size of the relationship was the largest for servant leadership. Furthermore, the relationship size for empowering, transformational, servant, and distributed leadership types was significantly larger than that of transactional leadership. We conclude that while servant leaders have a relatively stronger relationship with teacher job satisfaction, positive school leadership types are not mutually exclusive. The enactment of these positive practices in schools could synergistically enhance job satisfaction among teachers.