Resilient leadership in schools: The role of management team empowerment in shaping innovation and teacher satisfaction

Abstract

This study examined how school leaders’ resilience promotes team innovation and schoolteachers’ job satisfaction through its influence on school management team (SMT) empowerment. To minimize single-source bias, data were gathered from 86 elementary and junior high schools, including 86 school leaders, 357 school management team members, and 683 teachers who were not part of the school management team. Findings indicated significant positive associations between school leaders’ resilience and both school management team empowerment and team innovation. Moreover, school management team empowerment fully mediated the relationship between leaders’ resilience and schoolteachers’ job satisfaction. These results underscore the importance of resilience not only as an individual psychological capacity but also as a resource that can be transmitted to teams and positively influence schoolteachers’ job satisfaction as an organizational-level outcome. Given that resilience is a state-like capacity that can be developed through training, these findings have direct implications for leadership development and capacity building programs in schools.