This narrative review provides a fine-grained picture of principal resilience research from 47 journal articles starting from its birth in 2005 to 2024. Following the guidelines of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), this systematic review clarifies the construct of principal resilience and identifies the drivers and outcomes of principal resilience. As a result, a conceptual framework of principal resilience demonstrating the conceptual and empirical nexus among drivers, mechanisms, and outcomes which may serve as the spotlight for future directions in the perspectives of theory, methodology, and practice is presented. However, fragmentation of construct needs further investigation and evidence is still largely insufficient to declare it a mature scientific field. Promoting principal resilience is not just a buzz direction, but a solid path towards achieving individual principals’ growth and quality education.
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