A large body of research suggests that teachers’ commitment and job satisfaction are two key factors for the improvement of students’ learning capacities as well as teachers’ well-being, motivation, and teaching practices (Dou, Devos, & Valcke, 2017).

Among the many factors which influence job satisfaction and the organizational commitment of teachers school leadership is one of the most important ones (Humphreys, 2010; Nielsen & Daniels, 2012). Referring to the effectiveness of school leadership, the term “Leadership for Learning“ (LFL) has become increasingly popular among scholars over the past years (OECD, 2016; Townsend & MacBeath, 2011). The LFL model aims to connect school leadership to student achievement with the ultimate goal of providing an integrative (analytical) framework for educational leadership research as well as making available a clearly represented organizing device that is useful for practitioners (Swaffield & MacBeath, 2009). More precisely LFL refers to the idea that effective leaders demonstrate a contextually contingent mix of “instructional leadership, transformational leadership, and shared leadership” practices (Hallinger, 2011, p. 126). Hence, effective principals exhibit three kinds of leadership: instructional leadership behavior centered on the quality of teaching in classrooms, transformational leadership behavior focused on building up the capacity of those they work with and motivating them towards instilling change and transformation and shared leadership behavior comprised of a range of strategies for involving teachers in school-wide decision-making processes. Thus, unlike models focusing on specific leadership styles, the LFL framework emphasizes the relationship between school leadership, collaborative leadership practices/participation, context and learning at various organizational levels. The framework further suggests that principals become effective (mostly) indirectly and that leadership behavior as well as its connections to learning and its antecedents are shaped by a schools’ context and culture (Hallinger, 2011).

Findings from previous studies show that LFL is beneficial for the teachers’ job attitudes which are in turn prerequisites of a functioning school and of an extra effort of a schools’ personnel required for significant organizational change. Hence, teachers’ commitment and job satisfaction can be seen as a reflection of a principal’s leadership performance (Ware & Kitsantas, 2007). Nevertheless, most studies within this area of research conducted so far do not incorporate all three leadership facets – instructional, transformational and shared – into one coherent study design. Thus, it is not fully clear whether the three leadership facets have differential effects on teachers’ organizational commitment and job satisfaction. Moreover, a vast majority of studies do not take into account the multilevel structure of the underlying measurement design (Batistic, Cerne, & Vogel, 2017). This is problematic because leadership (for learning) is by nature a phenomenon that can have different consequences at various levels, e.g. between a principal and an individual teacher, and/or group of teachers and/or the entire school (Batistic et al., 2017; Dionne et al., 2014). From a methodological point of view the individual level (level 1) reflects the effects of inter-individual differences in perceptions of a principals’ leadership behavior whereas the school level (level 2) represents a climate or a context construct (Marsh et al., 2012). Thus, modeling LFL only on one particular measurement level (i.e. within or across schools) may lead to false conclusions with regard to the level of reference, like ecological fallacies (Boyce & Bowers, 2018).

The goal of the current study is to fill this gap and take a closer look at the differential and shared effects of LFL on teachers’ organizational commitment and job satisfaction within and across schools.

This study is a secondary analysis of teacher survey data collected by the Hamburg school inspection in Germany between 2012 and 2015. The teacher survey is conducted as a full population survey on the level of each school, thus, no sampling takes place; all teachers of a school are requested to participate in the online survey. The teacher questionnaire comprises a total of 114 items, divided into seven sections: a) teacher collaboration, b) (perceived) leadership behavior, c) teachers’ instructional practices, d) inner-school conditions for school and instructional improvement, e) teachers’ innovation capacity, f) job satisfaction of teachers and g) teachers’ organizational commitment. Transformational leadership was measured with the MLQ, instructional leadership with scales from TALIS. Additional scales were derived from other established studies and also tested within a pilot study. McDonalds’ Omega for the scales ranged from .76 to .91 on the within and from .84 to .99 on the between-level. Through the use of scales from established instruments, data can be compared to data from other studies in Europe and across the globe. Between 2012 and 2015 the inspection gathered data of n=3,746 teachers within n=126 schools. The school sample consists of 74 primary schools, 31 upper secondary schools, (“Gymnasium” in German) and 21 comprehensive schools (“Stadtteilschule” in German). The available school sample represents a proportion of 40% of all schools within Hamburg. The teaching staff within a single school ranged in size from 7 to 85 (mean=30). The response rate of the teacher online survey was 65.2 percent (N=5,745). Data was analyzed with the r package multilevel and the software Mplus 7. First, we computed the intra-class correlations in terms of ICC(1) (i.e., the proportion of between-group variance to the total variance) and ICC(2) (i.e., the reliability of a schools mean) as well as the rwgj(j)-index (i.e. a measure of the rater agreement among teachers within schools; see James, Demaree, & Wolf, 1984) for all leadership measures. Next, multilevel confirmatory factor analyses (MCFA) were estimated to ensure that the proposed leadership measurement model on each level fits the data well and to check if the constructs are the same and equally related to each other on the individual as well as on the school level. Afterwards we related the different leadership facets to the outcome variables using a multilevel (or doubly latent) structural equation approach (see Marsh et al., 2009) and finally added schools’ context variables.

The results show that all leadership facets can be considered as multilevel constructs, as a large amount of variance of the leadership measures was attributable to school differences (ICC(1): 22-37%). The ICC(2) values ranged between .89 (Individual Consideration) and .95 (Inspirational Motivation). The rwgj-(j)-indices suggested a moderated to strong level of agreement among teacher ratings within schools (ranging from .78 for Shared Leadership to .89 for Transformational Leadership and from .67 for Individual Consideration to .81 for Inspirational Motivation). The results of the multilevel confirmatory factor analyses (MCFA) of the leadership facets (Dimension Transformational Leadership: 1. Idealized Influence attributed, 2. Individual Consideration, 3. Inspirational Motivation; Dimension Instructional Leadership: 4. School Management, 5. Instructional Management, 6. Supervision; 7. Dimension Shared Leadership) show, that the leadership measurement model considering seven factors on both levels produced the best absolute fit (χ^2=1972.753 df=2305, p<0.001; and CFI, RMSEA, SRMRw, SRMRb of 0.95, 0.04, 0.03 and 0.07.). Thus, the factorial structure of the leadership measurement model does not differ across and between schools. The results of the doubly latent structural equation model indicate that particularly shared leadership significantly predicts teachers’ organizational commitment well as teachers’ job satisfaction on the individual (β_(Organizational Commitment,L1)=.374, β_(Job Satisfaction,L1)=.445) and on the school-level (β_(Organizational Commitment,L2)=.728, β_(Job Satisfaction,L2)=.721). Effect sizes range between ES = 0.84 (commitment) and ES= 0.95 (job satisfaction) at the individual, and between ES= 0.95 (commitment) and ES=1.00 (job satisfaction) at the school-level. Overall, our research makes a strong case for studying LFL within a multilevel framework and also for applying complex study and analytical designs, which should take the complexity of the theoretical assumptions into consideration all the way along from questionnaire design, through the process of data collection up to the point of data analysis.

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