Towards a model for sustainable leadership in educational contexts: A moderated mediated analysis of UAE and Hong Kong

Sustainable leadership aims to transcend the heroic assumptions inherent in traditional leadership approaches by fostering enduring value, effective work practices, and systems that prioritize long-term outcomes over a leader's personal qualities and attributes. This study proposes a theoretical model for sustainable leadership practices in educational contexts. This model serves both as a framework for future research and as a practical tool for evaluating and planning sustainable leadership practices within educational contexts. The study then uses this model as a theoretical framework to investigate sustainable leadership practices in the UAE and Hong Kong from teachers' perspectives, utilizing a comparative cross-sectional design on PISA 2022 teacher questionnaire data.It investigates the influence of teacher collaborative practices on sustainable leadership practices, while considering the mediating effects of professional development, school culture, and distributed leadership in strengthening the relationship between collaborative and sustainable leadership practices, as well as examining the moderating role of the country. The findings reveal an average level of sustainable leadership practices in both countries, with the UAE demonstrating higher scores across most variables, attributed to its national sustainability agenda and Vision 2030 educational policies, which emphasize collaborative leadership. In contrast, Hong Kong's competitive, examination-oriented system resulted in lower scores across most variables, except for professional development, which was slightly higher than that of the UAE. School culture, distributed leadership, and professional development play critical mediating roles in this relationship, exerting a greater impact in less developed educational systems like the UAE compared to more developed ones like Hong Kong.