Educational Leadership and Job Satisfaction
Educational leadership, job satisfaction, and their relationship are revealed in contemporary research on the psychosocial phenomena of educational organizations. Historically, leadership and job attitudes, including job satisfaction, were studied in separate literatures, with different methodologies, and by different groups of researchers. Educational leadership is a broad stream of study, relating all the richness of leadership schools of thought within the context of education. However, the typology identified in this article helps in summarizing and analyzing educational leadership theories. Job satisfaction is a narrower construct, the focus being on the attitudinal nature of it. Teacher job satisfaction is defined as teachers’ affective reactions to their work or to their teaching role. Literature suggests that among the many antecedent factors of job satisfaction, leadership (in a variety of its lenses, such as trait, position, role, process, relationship, and lifestyle) is one of the strongest predictive factors, even more, educational leadership in general has a large positive effect on job satisfaction. Thus, exploration of the relationship between educational leadership and job satisfaction leads to a rich understanding of how teachers and other employees experience the effects of leadership and of how job satisfaction is enhanced, leading to organizational effectiveness in educational settings.