Session Information
26 SES 02 B, School Leadership and Teacher Efficacy
Paper Session
Contribution
Trust is a key resource of social action, becoming necessary when moments of uncertainty must be bridged, and decisions must be made, but it remains uncertain whether expectations will be met on the individual or organisational level (Colquitt et al., 2011). Therefore, trust in others’ competence, reliability and integrity comes with a certain risk.
In education science, trust phenomena from leaders’ perspective play a minor role in general, particularly in the school context. Nevertheless, a large amount of school trust literature has revealed that trust is an antecedent to important education processes and outcomes, e.g., professional learning, instructional change and collaboration (Adams & Miskell, 2016).
In our study, we built on research that examines the relationship between trust and schools’ functioning, tying trust to schools’ innovation capacity (Louis & Murphy, 2017; Tschannen-Moran, 2009). More concretely, we focussed on school leaders and examined the effects of school leader trust in teachers on collective teacher innovativeness as a precursor of school improvement and change. In doing so, we examined individual and organisational ambidexterity’s potential role as a complementary set of activities and processes in mediating these effects, as the literature suggests that (organisational) ambidexterity – i.e., “the ability to simultaneously pursue both incremental and discontinuous innovation…from hosting multiple contradictory structures, processes and cultures within the same” (Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996, p. 24) organisation – mediates the trust-innovativeness relationship (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004).
Two central questions guided our research:
- What is the relationship between school leader trust in teachers and collective teacher innovativeness?
- How does individual and organisational ambidexterity mediate the relationship between school leader trust in teachers and collective teacher innovativeness?
Three concepts are key to our study: school leader trust in teachers; collective teacher innovativeness; and individual and organisational ambidexterity. Based on a literature review, we tested a mediation model which illustrates the relationships between the variables of interest in this study, namely school leader trust in teachers, school leader exploration and exploitation, school exploration and exploitation, and collective teacher innovativeness. In this conceptual framework, school leader trust in teachers is the key independent variable. Its direct effects on collective teacher innovativeness are proposed based on the very first empirical evidence concerning the relationship between both variables. School leader exploration and exploitation are viewed as micro-foundations of school exploration and exploitation, which are viewed as predictors of collective teacher innovativeness. Thus, exploration and exploitation among school leaders and schools are posited as mediators between school leader trust and collective teacher innovativeness.
With these variables in mind, the following hypotheses were tested:
H1: School leader trust in teachers affects collective teacher innovativeness directly.
H2a: School leader trust in teachers affects school leader exploration.
H2b: School leader trust in teachers does not affect school leader exploitation.
H3a and H3b: School leader exploration and exploitation are micro-foundations of school exploration and exploitation and, therefore, affect them.
H4a: School exploration affects collective teacher innovativeness.
H4b: School exploitation does not affect collective teacher innovativeness.
Method
For our research we used a unique, randomised and representative data set of N = 411 German school leaders. For gaining the data we used a questionnaire which comprised 35 item blocks, from which we used only a small part. We considered the following variables as part of our study: School leader trust was measured following Mayer at al. (1995) and Cunnigham and MacGregor (2000), School leader exploitation was measured by applying three items developed by Mom et al. (2009). School leader exploration is based on the same preliminary work as the school leader exploitation scale. School exploitation also is based on the features by which March (1991) characterised exploitation in the context of organisational learning. However, the items here do not refer to the school leader as a reference, but to the school as an organisation. Based on this and the work of Da’as (2022), three items were developed to capture the school’s exploitative orientation. School exploration was measured just like school exploitation. Again, three items were developed and used to capture the construct. Teacher innovativeness was measured with a scale from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS, OECD 2019). To test our hypotheses, we estimated mediated structural equation models in MPLUS 8.4 (Muthén & Muthén, 2017). To avoid a confounding of structure and measurement in our model, we followed the two-step approach suggested by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). As we estimated an indirect path model, a model containing mediator variables, we tested mediation effects’ robustness by applying a bootstrapped mediation analysis, providing 95% bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals with 1,000 bootstrap replications (Hayes, 2018). As our data stemmed from a single instrument, we also tested for common method bias by conducting Harman’s single factor test (Harman, 1960) in advance. Thus, we loaded all model variables on a single unrotated factor and tested whether these variables explained a substantial amount of the factor variance. This procedure indicated that the items collectively explained 26.7 percent of this single factor, well below the threshold of 50 percent, above which substantial bias in further estimations through common method bias is expected (Lance et al., 2010). Accordingly, we took no further action in this regard.
Expected Outcomes
The results indicate that school leader trust strongly affects collective teacher innovativeness. An additional effect could be achieved if school leaders, as a consequence of trusting their teachers, take more risks themselves, act exploratively and, as a result, create an explorative working environment for teachers. As school leaders’ exploitative and explorative activities impact schools on the organisational level, they are micro-foundations of organisational ambidexterity. The results provide evidence to advance an understanding of factors influencing collective teacher innovativeness and ambidexterity’s mediating role. This understanding might help promote collective teacher innovativeness that encourages change to improve schools.
References
Adams, C. M., & Miskell, R. C. (2016). Teacher Trust in District Administration: A Promis-ing Line of Inquiry. Educational Administration Quarterly, 52(4), 675–706. Anderson, J. C., & Gerbing, D. W. (1988). Structural Equation Modeling in Practice: A Re-view and Recommended Two-Step Approach. Psychological Bulletin, 103(3), 411–423. Colquitt, J. A., LePine, J. A., Zapata, C. P., & Wild, R. (2011). Trust in Typical and High-Reliability Contexts: Building and Reacting to Trust among Firefighters. Academy of Man-agement Journal, 54(5), 999–1015. Cunningham, J. B., & MacGregor, J. (2000). Trust and the design of work complementary constructs in satisfaction and performance. Human relations, 53(12), 1575–1591. Da’as, R. A. (2021). The missing link: Principals’ ambidexterity and teacher creativity. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1–22. Gibson, C. B., & Birkinshaw, J. (2004). The antecedents, consequences, and mediating role of organizational ambidexterity. Academy of management Journal, 47(2), 209–226. Harman, H. H. (1960). Modern Factor Analysis. University of Chicago Press. Hayes, A. F. (2018). Partial, conditional, and moderated moderated mediation: Quantifica-tion, inference, and interpretation. Communication monographs, 85(1), 4–40. Lance, C. E., Dawson, B., Birkelbach, D., & Hoffman, B. J. (2010). Method effects, meas-urement error, and substantive conclusions. Organizational Research Methods, 13(3), 435–455. Louis, K. S., & Murphy, J. F. (2017). Trust, caring and organizational learning: the leader’s role. Journal of Educational Administration, 55(1), 103–126. March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization science, 2(1), 71–87. Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, D. F. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organiza-tional Trust. Academy of Management Review, 20, 709–734. Mom, T. J., Van Den Bosch, F. A., & Volberda, H. W. (2009). Understanding variation in managers' ambidexterity: Investigating direct and interaction effects of formal structural and personal coordination mechanisms. Organization Science, 20(4), 812–828. Muthen, L. K. & Muthen, B. O. (2017). Mplus User’s Guide. Muthén & Muthén. OECD (2019). TALIS 2018 technical report. OECD. https://www.oecd.org/education/talis/TALIS_2018_Technical_Report.pdf Tschannen-Moran, M. (2009). Fostering Teacher Professionalism in Schools – the Role of Leadership Orientation and Trust. Educational Administration Quarterly, 45(2), 217–247. Tushman, M. L., & O’Reilly, C. A. (1996). The ambidextrous organization: Managing evo-lutionary and revolutionary change. California Management Review, 38, 1–23.
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