Empowered to act: How leadership fosters teacher agency

The role of teacher agency in shaping school practices is receiving increasing attention from leadership and management researchers, who are beginning to recognise its significance in school improvement. This study aims to explore the ways and circumstances under which principals’ empowering leadership behaviours facilitate teacher agency. In this regard, data were collected from 1902 public secondary school teachers in Türkiye. The study first examined the relationship between empowering leadership and teacher agency. Then it tested the mediation effect of teacher autonomy and the moderating effect of distributed leadership on this relationship. Subsequently, the study investigated the relationship between empowering leadership and teacher agency, by testing the mediating role of teacher autonomy and the moderating effects of gender, school district, and seniority. The findings support a partial mediation model stating that the principal's empowering leadership approach affects teacher agency both directly and indirectly through teacher autonomy. Furthermore, distributed leadership and the school district were found to play a moderating role between empowering leadership and teacher agency. This study provides valuable insights for practitioners and researchers who work in similar hierarchical and collectivist cultures, such as Türkiye.