Principals Who Lead Teaching May Ignite Teacher Enthusiasm Through Self-Efficacy

What makes a teacher walk into a classroom genuinely excited to teach? A new study drawing on data from more than 1,300 teachers in Shanghai suggests that the answer lies less in personality and more in a chain of psychological mechanisms that begins with the school principal. Published in Current Psychology, the research by Mengting Qian and Chunshun Yan of East China Normal University, with affiliations at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto, applies a well-known theory of student emotions to the adults at the front of the classroom, and the results carry a striking message: teacher collaboration alone does not breed enthusiasm, but collaboration that builds teachers’ confidence in their own abilities does.

Teaching enthusiasm is far more than a feel-good buzzword. Researchers define it as a composite of teachers’ positive emotional experiences during instruction, their sense that teaching is intrinsically valuable, and their engagement and satisfaction at work. Decades of evidence link it to outcomes that matter: teachers who feel and display enthusiasm tend to foster greater enjoyment, motivation, and performance among their students, and recent work on classroom language shows that enthusiastic teachers literally speak differently, using more motivating instructional messages. Longitudinal studies even suggest an emotional transmission channel, in which teachers’ and students’ perceptions of enthusiastic teaching reinforce one another over time. Enthusiasm also travels with professional benefits, co-occurring with self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and occupational well-being.

Yet most research has focused on individual factors such as personality, emotion regulation, and efficacy beliefs. The organizational route, how school leadership shapes enthusiasm, has remained comparatively murky. Qian and Yan set out to illuminate that route using the Shanghai teacher sample from the 2024 Teaching and Learning International Survey, or TALIS, administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. After cleaning the original dataset of 4,078 teachers, they arrived at a final analytic sample of 1,303 teachers nested in 205 schools, with cluster sizes ranging from 2 to 10 teachers per school. Women made up 73.22 percent of the sample, 60.32 percent were aged 30 to 49, 77.36 percent held a bachelor’s degree, and 88.64 percent worked full time.

The theoretical engine of the study is control–value theory, developed by psychologist Reinhard Pekrun to explain students’ achievement emotions. The theory holds that emotions such as enjoyment and satisfaction arise from two subjective appraisals: control, the belief that one can successfully carry out an activity, and value, the perceived importance and meaning of that activity. Positive emotions flourish when both appraisals are favorable. The authors cautiously extended this logic from students to teachers, treating teaching self-efficacy, a teacher’s judgment of their ability to manage classrooms, explain concepts, and adapt instructional strategies, as the central control appraisal. Teacher collaboration, meanwhile, was framed as a value-related resource embedded in the school context, capable of reinforcing the professional meaning of teaching through knowledge sharing, joint lesson planning, peer feedback, and emotional support.

Shanghai offers an unusually rich setting for testing these ideas. Chinese schools have long institutionalized collaborative practice through teaching-research groups, collective lesson planning, and open classes in which colleagues observe and evaluate one another’s lessons. Unlike systems that prize individual teacher autonomy, instructional improvement in China is typically embedded in stable peer interaction. But the authors are careful to note that collaboration is not inherently beneficial; its effects depend on quality, trust, and the scope for professional autonomy. This nuance turned out to be central to the findings.

Methodologically, the study measured principal instructional leadership with four TALIS items covering instructional responsibility, responsibility for learning outcomes, monitoring of teacher performance, and provision of useful feedback, deliberately excluding items about vision and relational leadership. Teacher collaboration was captured with seven items on a frequency scale from never to once a week or more. Teaching self-efficacy drew on 16 items spanning classroom management and instructional strategies, and teaching enthusiasm used four items about enjoyment, happiness, enthusiasm, and satisfaction during teaching. All scales showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.862 to 0.958. The authors tested serial mediation using PROCESS Model 6 with 5,000 bootstrap samples, controlling for gender, age, education, and employment status, and then ran a two-level random-intercept model in Mplus as a robustness check.

The headline result is that principal instructional leadership was positively associated with teaching enthusiasm, with the strongest bivariate correlation in the dataset (r = 0.447). The total effect was 0.4215, of which the direct effect was 0.3162 and the total indirect effect was 0.1053, accounting for 24.99 percent of the total. But the decomposition of that indirect effect is where the study becomes genuinely revealing. The single largest pathway ran through teaching self-efficacy alone, explaining 17.82 percent of the total effect. The serial path, in which leadership fosters collaboration, which in turn strengthens self-efficacy, which then feeds enthusiasm, accounted for 3.99 percent. The collaboration-only path was the weakest at 3.17 percent, with a bootstrap 95 percent confidence interval of [0.0004, 0.0273], a lower bound so close to zero that the authors describe it as marginal and warrant cautious interpretation.

In other words, collaboration relates to enthusiasm primarily by building efficacy beliefs rather than through a direct emotional lift. The authors integrate control–value theory with Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory to explain this sequence: collaborative experiences supply peer modeling, verbal persuasion, joint problem solving, and mastery experiences, all established sources of efficacy beliefs, and it is the strengthened sense of instructional control that ultimately connects to positive emotions in the classroom. Routine meetings or material sharing that do not improve teachers’ actual work are unlikely to matter. Collaboration that provides usable feedback, transferable strategies, and professional recognition is what pays off. The multilevel robustness analysis, prompted by a school-level intraclass correlation of 0.068 for enthusiasm, confirmed the direction of the within-school effects, though the authors treat it as supplementary given the small cluster sizes.

The study also surfaced intriguing covariate patterns. Male teachers reported slightly higher enthusiasm than female teachers, younger teachers reported greater enthusiasm than older colleagues, possibly reflecting early-career idealism and lower occupational fatigue, and part-time teachers reported lower teaching self-efficacy, plausibly because they have fewer opportunities to join teaching-research groups and collective planning sessions where mastery experiences and peer support accumulate. The authors flag these explanations as tentative and as prompts for future research rather than established mechanisms.

The implications for school leadership are concrete. Because roughly 75 percent of the total effect remained direct, leadership clearly matters beyond the measured mediators, but the mediators that did emerge point to a clear priority: leaders should focus on the quality rather than the frequency of collaboration, ensuring that joint planning, peer observation, and feedback generate genuine mastery experiences. Targeted instructional support for part-time teachers and those with lower self-efficacy could be especially valuable. The authors caution that the data are cross-sectional and cannot establish causation, that complete-case screening reduced the sample, that some fit indices were mixed, and that Shanghai’s comparatively developed, highly institutionalized educational context means the findings should not be generalized to China as a whole. Still, by extending control–value theory from students’ achievement emotions to teachers’ occupational emotions, the study opens a promising window onto how school organizations can cultivate one of teaching’s most contagious resources.

Subject of Research: The relationship between principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among Shanghai teachers, mediated by teacher collaboration and teaching self-efficacy within control–value theory

Article Title: Principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among teachers in Shanghai: mediating mechanisms within a control–value theory framework

Article References: Qian, M., & Yan, C. (2026). Principal instructional leadership and teaching enthusiasm among teachers in Shanghai: mediating mechanisms within a control–value theory framework. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10004-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10004-z

Keywords: principal instructional leadership, teaching enthusiasm, teacher collaboration, teaching self-efficacy, control–value theory, TALIS 2024, Shanghai, teacher emotions, school leadership, educational psychology, serial mediation, Current Psychology