The effect of collectivist culture on teachers’ wellbeing: mediating role of social justice leadership

Purpose The purpose of this study is to determine how the principals’ social justice leadership (SJL) indirectly affects the connection between teachers’ collectivism (CL) and their wellbeing (WB). The hypotheses we developed in this context: Hypothesis 1: There is a direct and significant relationship between teachers’ CL and school principals’ SJL Hypothesis 2: There is a direct and significant relationship between teachers’ CL and teachers’ WB Hypothesis 3: There is a direct and significant relationship between school principals’ SJL and teachers’ WB. Hypothesis 4: School principals’ SJL has a mediating role between teachers’ CL and teachers’ WB. Design/methodology/approach This study employed a cross-sectional quantitative design to investigate its objectives. Firstly, descriptive statistics, reliability coefficients and correlation analysis were performed, followed by structural equation modeling path analysis to evaluate the direct effects among the model variables (i.e. collectivism, social justice leadership and wellbeing) in AMOS. Findings First, based on the findings of the current study, we confirm that CL significantly and positively influences school principals’ SJL. Second, we found that principals’ SJL significantly and highly influenced teachers’ WB Third, we examine the link between teachers’ levels of CL and WB. According to our findings, there is a moderate positive correlation between teachers’ CL levels and WB levels. Finally, our results show SJL of school principals indirectly influences the impact of teachers’ CL on teachers’ WB by first discovering of SJL of school leaders’ fully mediating role in the related literature. Research limitations/implications There are measures of collectivism, social justice leadership and well-being based on the self-ratings of the teachers participating in the study. Therefore, the focus is on teachers’ subjective thoughts and perceptions of collectivism, social justice leadership and well-being. Our research is the first to demonstrate the complete mediating role of principals’ social justice leadership in the relationship between teachers’ collectivist values and their well-being. Practical implications Given the existing literature, we believe that collectivism’s emphasis on social solidarity and loyalty may be helpful in its interactions with social justice leadership or teacher well-being. Furthermore, this study contributes to the literature on educational administration by providing a local perspective on social justice leadership in light of the country’s cultural peculiarities. As a result, we inform education policymakers in Turkey and other countries similar to Turkey about the need of training school principals in social justice leadership while taking cultural aspects into consideration. Social implications Social justice leadership, which focuses on the needs and development of disadvantaged students, is distinguished by the support of collectivist culture in countries such as Turkey, and social justice leadership has a positive impact on teacher wellbeing, which is beneficial to student success. Originality/value Our research is the first to demonstrate the complete mediating role of principals’ social justice leadership in the relationship between teachers’ collectivist values and their wellbeing. In addition to highlighting the need for leadership in schools, this study contributed to the literature by being the first to emphasize the importance of social justice leadership in the relationship between collectivist culture and teacher wellbeing.