ABSTRACT
The present study explores whether principals’ emotional intelligence, especially the wherewithal to recognize emotions, encourages their transformational leadership behaviors, which in turn promote the positive reframing of teachers’ emotions. To this end, we have analyzed multi-source data from principals and their teachers at 69 randomly sampled primary schools. All the surveyed administrators completed a performance task that enabled us to assess their capacity for identifying emotions. In addition, half the teachers (N = 319) reported on their principal’s leadership style and the other half (N = 320) on their own perceptions of his or her ability to boost their spirits. Approaching the data using multi-level structural equation modeling, among our key findings was a cross-level relation between the transformational leadership behaviors of the administrators and their faculty’s emotional reframing. In addition, we found a positive correlation between the principals’ ability to recognize feelings and their transformational behaviors. What is more, the study demonstrated that transformational leadership fully mediates the effects of this capacity on teachers’ experience of having their affects altered by a principal. Our findings empirically corroborate the hypothesis that transformational leadership improves emotional wellbeing.
