Instructional leadership and adaptive performance

Educational change requires educators to adapt to evolving pedagogical, technological, and organizational demands. This cross-sectional study examined associations among instructional leadership, psychological empowerment, perceived collective efficacy, and adaptive performance among 401 educators recruited through convenience sampling from three public and private schools in Sulu Province, Philippines. Partial least squares structural equation modeling showed no significant direct association between instructional leadership and adaptive performance. Instructional leadership was nevertheless indirectly associated with adaptive performance through psychological empowerment, perceived collective efficacy, and the theoretically specified sequence involving both variables. The coefficient for the indirect association through perceived collective efficacy was numerically larger than those for the other indirect pathways, although the differences between indirect effects were not formally tested. The findings are consistent with the hypothesized indirect-association model but do not establish mediation as a temporal or causal process. Because the data were cross-sectional, self-reported, and nonprobability-based, the results apply to the participating educators and should not be generalized to Philippine educators as a whole.