Teachers may benefit from engaging in different cooperation forms with their colleagues and perceive social support from them to maintain a high quality of instruction. This can help to meet professional demands, and extra-curricular obligations, and minimize negative strain. However, whether teachers’ cooperation forms predict their later perceived social support, principal cognitive empathy, and strain has been investigated rarely. Drawing upon the stress-strain-resources concept, we assumed that five teacher cooperation forms predict low levels of perceived negative strain but high levels of perceived social support and cognitive empathy from principals. In this longitudinal study, 456 teachers completed the same questionnaire at 2 measurement times, at the beginning of a school year and 19 months later at the end of the next school year. We explored which teacher cooperation form affected teachers’ perceived principal cognitive empathy, social support, and strain. The criterium variables were teachers’ perceived principal cognitive empathy and social support. Teachers’ information exchange as cooperation form significantly, and positively predicted their perceived principal cognitive empathy and social support. In turn, perceived principal cognitive empathy and social support were negatively related to teachers’ strain 19 months later. Our results indicate that teachers who cooperate with their colleagues through information exchange perceive principals’ cognitive empathy and social support among teachers as higher as well as less strain than those who cooperated rarely by information exchange. These results can be utilized to support and encourage principals in promoting cooperation among teachers to mitigate negative strain and maintain high instructional quality.
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