School factors that are related to school principals' job satisfaction and organizational commitment

Abstract

Despite that principals' job satisfaction and organizational commitment are substantial for recruitment and retention of effective leaders, research exploring school factors for the deterministic role in such attitudes has been unexpectedly rare. Given the crucial role of a school principal in leading school success, understanding the status of the principal's psychological conditions and the antecedent school factors is important. This research is a secondary analysis using the TALIS 2013 dataset, and applied a rigorous quantitative approach. Latent Trait method was first applied to construct latent variables of principals' job satisfaction and organizational commitment to compare the interests across countries. Then a two-level Generalized Structural Equation Model was used to detect the structured relationship between a set of school factors and principals' attitudes with pooled 32-country data. Finally, Generalized Structural Equation Model was fitted for each country's data to investigate how school factors influence principals' attitudes in different contexts. The study revealed significant variations among countries and continents in the principal's job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The school's positive social interaction, safety, human resource, autonomy for staffing, school management type and the funding resources significantly predict the principal's attitudes towards the job and the school.