ABSTRACT
Empirical studies have drawn a correlation between principals’ transformational leadership and both teachers’ motivation and commitment to school. For the most part, though, researchers have overlooked the emotional mechanisms that undergird this relation. Our point of departure is that transformational leaders can alter the emotions of subordinates. With this in mind, we will take stock of faculty members’ principal-induced experiences of affective reframing that mediate the connections between transformational school leadership and esprit de corps. By means of questionnaires, we gleaned information from 639 teachers at 69 randomly sampled primary schools in Israel. The data was scrutinized using multi-level path software. Our findings demonstrate that emotional reframing fully arbitrated the impact of transformational leadership behaviors on the teachers’ motivation and partially mediated the influence of this leadership style on teachers’ commitment to school. What is more, we concluded that transformational school leadership was indirectly tied to affective staff commitment to the organization through emotional reframing and motivation. The present study breaks new ground by establishing that teachers’ sense of emotional reframing is a major avenue by which principals can boost their staff’s motivation and commitment to the organization.
