ABSTRACT
Educational leadership naturally plays a major role in a school’s success. Many contend that such leadership is exerted through the principal’s influence over faculty members’ emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. That said, the literature’s understanding of how principals affect teacher emotions is rather scant. Most of the relevant studies revolve around general explanations and forgo controlled research designs. As a result, there is a dearth of firm knowledge on the emotive support that administrators provide distressed faculty members. With its focus on interpersonal communication, the present study aspires to fill this void. Experimental vignettes enable scholars to infer causality. Adopting this method, we collected data from a sample of 113 elementary school teachers. We determined that there is a positive correlation between executive empathic listening and attributed emotional reframing (i.e., affective change), regardless of the specific message that principals convey. However, only the presence of a principal’s reframing message—be it empowering, normalizing, or otherwise—helps transform teachers’ negative affect.
