Examining the relationship between principal mindful leadership, work-life balance, and teacher effectiveness in Malaysian secondary schools: The mediating role of job satisfaction

Teacher effectiveness is the indispensable catalyst in transforming educational curricula into tangible, high-quality learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the concurrent struggle with school leadership and work-life balance issues presents substantial barriers that diminish teachers’ operational capability. Grounded by the stimulus-organism-response (SOR), high-reliability organisation (HRO), and job demand-resources (JD-R) theories, this study examined how teacher job satisfaction mediates the influence of principal mindful leadership and teachers’ work-life balance and effectiveness. Employing a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from 384 teachers across 153 sary schools in the Malaysian state of Terengganu. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling analysis for model evaluation and hypothesis testing demonstrated that mindful leadership and work-life balance significantly enhance teacher effectiveness, with job satisfaction partially mediating these relationships. The findings offer distinct contributions to the literature on mindful leadership in Eastern, collectivist settings and provide an empirical basis for school leadership training and policy intervention to optimise teacher performance.