Teacher professional well-being (TPW) is now a salient field of study as it has been found to be directly or indirectly related to school effectiveness by affecting various factors, such as teacher health (Gray et al., 2017), teacher effectiveness (Duckworth et al., 2009), student achievement (Branand & Nakamura, 2016), and teachers’ organizational commitment (Creemers & Reezigt, 1996). Despite the different definitions and operationalizations of TPW due to its multidimensional nature, the recent conceptual framework offered by OECD (Viac & Fraser, 2020) defined it around physical, mental, cognitive, subjective, and social dimensions. However, while considerable literature has grown around the theme of general well-being, the literature review revealed a paucity of research on TPW (Yildirim, 2015).

The challenging nature of tasks for schools to function properly requires principals to be in two places at once, which is an impossible task to accomplish, so there needs to be a distributed form of leadership allowing teachers and principals to share various leadership functions (Day et al., 2020). Distributed leadership (DL) points out the importance of “interactions among leaders, followers, and their situation” (Spillane, 2005, p. 145), meaning that the functioning of interrelational practices matters. Therefore, DL functions have been conceptualized in relation to developing people, instructional management, and organizational decision-making (Liu & Printy, 2017).

According to the literature, leadership is contextualized differently across the world due to the differences in people’s perceptions and practices of leadership (Hofstede, 1984; House et al., 2014). Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between TPW and DL functions, taking into account the cultural dimensions within clusters of countries. Country clusters were created in this study in a way that countries within clusters exhibit cultural resemblance, whereas cultural dissimilarity exists across clusters. Consequently, the following clusters were established: a Balkan cluster with Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania and Türkiye; an Anglo-Saxon cluster with the USA, United Kingdom and Australia; a Nordic cluster with Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; and an East and South East Asia cluster with Japan, South Korea and Singapore. It is hypothesized that there are differences across country clusters in terms of predicting TPW through different DL dimensions. It seems plausible to explain the differences among country clusters in terms of their differences in DL and TPW due to some cultural characteristics (e.g., power distance, individualism/ collectivism) dominant within clusters.

In light of all this information, this study aims to investigate the relationship between TPW and DL practices within the school by looking at the issue from an intercultural lens. Liu et al. (2022) emphasized that there is inconsistent evidence on the direct relationship between TPW and DL practices in the literature, where they also find that there is no direct relationship between TPW and DL in China school setting. However, a study conducted in Türkiye found that DL has a positive and significant effect on teachers’ organizational happiness (Algan & Ummanel, 2019). Additionally, Thien and Lee (2023) pointed out the research gap in school-level dimensions and TPW and found that in order to cultivate TPW, involvement in the decision-making process, and healthy and positive communication among the principal and teachers is needed in the Malaysian context. As seen, there are differences among contexts about the possible relationship between TPW and DL (or its sub-dimensions) is apparent. From this point of view, there is a need to answer the research question, “Is there a significant difference among different country clusters regarding the relationship between DL and TPW?”

This study aims to understand whether TPW is predicted by different DL dimensions across four country clusters introduced in the previous section. The TPW construct was measured with 28 items that resemble the OECD’s TPW conceptualization (Viac & Fraser, 2020). Of these 28 items, 12 are related to “job satisfaction,” 10 to “self-efficacy,” two to “psychosomatic symptoms,” three to “teacher-student relationship,” and one to the “feeling of trust” dimensions. The DL construct was measured with 13 items corresponding to Printy and Liu’s (2021) operationalization of DL. Of these 13 items, six are related to “developing people,” five to “managing instruction,” and two to “organizational decision-making dimensions.” Firstly, Little’s test was used to determine whether data were missing completely at random, and then multiple imputation was applied to handle the missing data (Baraldi & Enders, 2013). Secondly, measurement invariance in the clusters was checked for TPW and DL dimensions using multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). In this study, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 dataset is used, which is collected by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from a broad range of countries in order to help these countries to cope with the challenges they face (OECD, 2019). For four country clusters, the teacher-level data includes 90,534 teachers, while group-level data includes 5,362 principals as participants in total. Because the TALIS 2018 dataset has a nested data structure with teachers nested in schools, two-level hierarchical linear models were applied to the country clusters using the lme4 package (Bates et al., 2015) in R. Principals’ DL functions modeled as group-level variables, whereas TPW was modeled as the individual-level variable. These models regarded each cluster as unique and allowed us to compare clusters in terms of their cultural characteristics. A similar approach has been used by Liu and Benoliel (2022) to investigate multi-country data. Intra-class correlation (ICC) was derived to assess the lower-level outcome variance that can be attributed to higher-level variables. It showed that for each country cluster, it is reasonable to conduct a multi-level analysis. Furthermore, prior to analyses, we grand-mean centered the group-level independent variables as we hypothesized the effects of group-level variables on individual-level outcomes (Hofmann & Gavin, 1998).

The preliminary analysis results indicated that the multicollinearity assumption is verified by the correlation matrix and VIF, and the normality assumption is satisfied through QQ plots, as almost all points fall approximately along the reference line. Four CFA models showed measurement variance across country clusters, so that the results of the HLM should be interpreted carefully when the means across the clusters are compared. Two-level linear models partitioned the variance in TPW that is associated with teacher-level and school-level variations. The results from unconditional models of TPW for each country cluster showed that variations between schools could explain variations in TPW ranging from 10.25% to 14.81%. Therefore, it seems that two-level models are appropriate. Building on the baseline model, adding principals’ DL functions as a random effect contributed to the explained variance of TPW ranging from 5% to 10%. The results from the random effect model indicated that each principal DL function is positively related to TPW, even though their significance varies across country clusters. For example, the organizational decision-making and developing people functions were found to be significant predictors of TPW in the Balkan countries cluster; only the managing instruction function of DL was found to be related to TPW in the Nordic countries cluster. This and many similar results of the present study can be explained by the cultural differences in terms of individualism/collectivism and power distance across country clusters.

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