School principals’ leadership behaviors and teachers’ quiet quitting: the mediating role of trust in the principal and the moderating role of surface acting

Teachers’ quiet quitting has emerged as an important challenge for educational organizations, particularly in centralized systems where teacher and school principal autonomy may be limited. In such contexts, teachers’ perceptions of their school principals and their trust in them may be especially relevant for understanding quiet quitting behaviors. Surface acting may also shape the extent to which teachers display quiet quitting. Against this background, we examined the mediating role of trust in the school principals and the moderating role of surface acting in the relationships between school principals’ supportive and directive leadership behaviors and teachers’ quiet quitting. The final sample comprised 421 teachers working in primary, middle, and high schools across 27 schools in Türkiye. The hypothesized relationships were tested using mediation and moderation analyses with bootstrapping techniques to assess direct and indirect effects. The results indicated that trust in the school principal mediated the relationship between supportive leadership and teachers’ quiet quitting, whereas both direct and indirect relationships were observed for directive leadership. Furthermore, teachers’ surface acting significantly moderated the relationship between trust in the principal and quiet quitting. A moderated mediation analysis showed that the indirect effect of leadership behaviors on quiet quitting through trust was conditional on surface acting, such that this effect was stronger among teachers reporting higher levels of surface acting. The findings indicate that supportive leadership may be associated with lower quiet quitting through trust-building processes, whereas directive leadership may be associated with higher quiet quitting. They further indicate that trust may be especially important for teachers reporting high levels of surface acting. These results imply that educational policymakers and school principals should prioritize trust-building strategies to reduce quiet quitting, rather than depending primarily on controlling directive leadership behaviors.