Job Satisfaction Challenges in Lebanese Educational NGOs: Is Transformational Leadership the key?

Purpose: Lebanon’s 2019‑2024 poly‑crisis devastated educators’ purchasing power; fresh‑dollar decrees in 2023‑2024 restored a livable wage, yet morale remained flat. This paper explores, through a purely qualitative lens, whether transformational leadership (TL) can address the non‑salary stressors that now dominate educators’ work lives in Lebanese educational NGOs. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative critical‑interpretive synthesis (CIS) of 68 peer‑reviewed and grey documents (January 2023–March 2025) was undertaken. Texts included interview‑based studies, case narratives, policy briefs and NGO learning reports. Following Noblit and Hare (1988) meta‑ethnographic steps, first‑order (participant) and second‑order (author) constructs were re‑translated into overarching third‑order themes. Findings: Three interlocking wounds recur across the literature: capability anxiety (teachers narrate “tech shame” and fear of hybrid platforms), complexity overload (accounts of “Excel avalanches” and “audit‑visible reporting”), and purpose drift (staff speak of “mission ping‑pong” as donor KPIs rotate). In crisis settings from Nepal to Argentina, Transformational Leadership behaviors; especially risk‑sharing, vision narration and peer‑learning rituals appear to transform these wounds into sources of collective agency (Bass and Riggio, 2006; Cummings et al., 2018; Judge and Piccolo, 2004). Research limitations/implications: Although this study integrates a wide array of qualitative evidence; interview transcripts, focus-group narratives, case vignettes drawn from both published and unpublished sources, it did not include new primary fieldwork in Lebanese NGOs. Future research should complement this conceptual synthesis with in-situ ethnographic interviews and participant observation to test and refine the proposed Transformational Leadership micro-practice model. Practical implications: A five‑step, low‑cost Transformational Leadership (TL) for‑Learning‑Quality Toolkit is proposed; every practice is traceable to successful examples in the reviewed literature.