The research, published in the journal Discover Education, was grounded in Full Range Leadership Theory, a widely used framework that conceptualizes leadership as a spectrum spanning three broad styles. Transformational leadership, at the active and inspirational end, motivates followers through idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. Transactional leadership operates through structured exchanges: contingent rewards for meeting agreed standards and management-by-exception, in which leaders intervene when performance deviates from expectations. At the passive end sits laissez-faire leadership, marked by delayed decisions, absent supervision, and an avoidance of responsibility altogether.

To measure these styles, the researchers adapted the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, the standard instrument developed by Bass and Avolio, and paired it with the classic 18-item Organizational Commitment Questionnaire developed by Allen and Meyer, which captures three distinct dimensions of workplace attachment. Affective commitment reflects emotional attachment to the school; continuance commitment reflects the perceived cost of leaving; and normative commitment reflects a felt moral obligation to stay. Questionnaires were translated into Afaan Oromo and independently back-translated to guarantee linguistic equivalence, and pilot testing confirmed acceptable internal consistency across all scales.

The statistical verdict on leadership practice was unambiguous. One-sample t-tests, benchmarked against the theoretical midpoint of 3.00 on a five-point scale, showed that principals’ transformational leadership scored far below expectations, with a mean of just 2.06 and an effect size of 7.15, an unusually large deviation. Transactional leadership also fell significantly below the midpoint at 2.76, with contingent rewards rated particularly low at a mean of 1.94, suggesting that recognition and performance-based incentives are rarely deployed. Laissez-faire behavior, by contrast, exceeded the midpoint at a mean of 3.28, with item-level analysis showing consistent agreement across indicators of leadership avoidance, delayed decision-making, and restricted supervisory engagement.

Teachers’ organizational commitment followed a similarly discouraging pattern. Overall commitment registered dramatically below the scale midpoint, with a t-value of -26.636 and a large effect size of 1.92. Continuance commitment, at a mean of 2.73, was the strongest of the three dimensions, but the researchers interpret this as a warning sign rather than a strength: teachers appear to stay because leaving carries personal and professional costs, not because they feel emotionally bound to their schools or obligated to their mission. Affective and normative commitment, the dimensions most closely tied to discretionary effort and organizational citizenship, were weaker still.

Correlation analysis then probed whether leadership style and commitment move together. Transformational leadership showed a modest but statistically significant positive association with normative commitment, hinting that visionary and supportive behavior can strengthen teachers’ sense of moral obligation. Transactional leadership produced a split result: a positive, significant correlation with continuance commitment but a negative, significant correlation with normative commitment, consistent with reward-based exchanges reinforcing stay-or-leave calculations while doing little for principled dedication. Laissez-faire leadership correlated negatively with affective and continuance commitment and with overall commitment, aligning with the international consensus that passive leadership erodes staff motivation.

Multiple regression added an important and humbling nuance. The combination of transformational and transactional styles significantly predicted normative commitment, but the model explained only 3.3 percent of the variance. Transformational leadership contributed a positive coefficient and transactional leadership a negative one, yet neither predictor reached individual significance. Leadership, the authors conclude, is statistically related to commitment but is only one thread in a much larger organizational fabric that includes working conditions, professional development opportunities, school climate, institutional support, and teachers’ personal circumstances.

That nuance matters for policy. Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education has reported that only about 30.2 percent of primary school leaders possess the necessary leadership competencies, and prior Ethiopian studies have linked weak principal preparation, political interference, and inadequate institutional support to low teacher commitment. The Haramaya findings echo this national picture at the local level and suggest that leadership training alone, while necessary, will not suffice. The researchers recommend embedding transformational leadership competencies, instructional leadership, collaborative decision-making, and regular performance feedback into ongoing professional development, and incorporating leadership performance into principal evaluation and school quality assurance systems.

The study’s design carries caveats that temper causal claims. The cross-sectional, correlational approach cannot establish whether passive leadership lowers commitment or whether disengaged teachers simply perceive their principals more negatively; reverse causality remains possible. All data came from self-report questionnaires, leaving results vulnerable to social desirability and common method bias, and the single-woreda sample limits generalizability. The authors also note that no validated cut-off scores exist for the commitment scale, so the low scores should be read as relatively depressed commitment rather than categorical inadequacy, and they call for longitudinal, multilevel, and mixed-methods designs to untangle the mechanisms at work.

Even with those limitations, the signal is hard to ignore. In a system where nearly seven in ten school leaders are considered under-prepared, the passive leadership documented in Haramaya Woreda appears to coexist with a teaching workforce that stays out of inertia rather than conviction. The study’s central message is that reclaiming teacher commitment in Ethiopian primary schools will require leaders who show up: setting a shared vision, rewarding achievement deliberately, and replacing avoidance with active, supportive engagement in the daily life of their schools.

Subject of Research: Principals' leadership styles and teachers' organizational commitment in Ethiopian primary schools.

Article Title: Principals’ leadership styles and teachers’ organizational commitment in primary schools of Haramaya Woreda, Ethiopia

Article References: Arab, A., Asegu, D. A., Abamalik, H. D., Mosisa, C., & Basha, G. (2026). Principals’ leadership styles and teachers’ organizational commitment in primary schools of Haramaya Woreda, Ethiopia. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 900. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02117-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02117-1

Keywords: transformational leadership, transactional leadership, laissez-faire leadership, organizational commitment, primary schools, principals, teacher retention, Ethiopia, educational leadership, teacher motivation, school management, Discover Education

The persistence of this leadership gap is particularly striking when viewed against the demographic reality of the profession itself. If women constitute roughly three-quarters of PK-12 educators, one might expect their representation in administration to approach parity, since promotion pipelines typically draw from the ranks of experienced teachers. Instead, the distribution of decision-making authority diverges sharply from the composition of the workforce, a pattern that researchers in educational leadership have documented for decades. This disconnect suggests that the barriers involved are not simply matters of individual ambition or qualification, but reflect structural and cultural dynamics that operate across hiring committees, search processes, board relationships and informal professional networks. Understanding how those dynamics function is a precondition for changing them, which is precisely the kind of practical knowledge the new book attempts to codify for its readers.

The authors’ combined vantage points give the project an unusual blend of scholarly and practitioner credibility. One author brings nearly two decades of frontline experience as a teacher, principal and district-level leader before transitioning into higher education, where she now directs a doctoral program in K-12 administration. The other is an active district superintendent-level administrator who completed both her master’s and doctoral work at the same university, and whose dissertation research involved in-depth interviews with two dozen women in educational administration. That research found a consistent pattern: every woman interviewed reported encountering either an entrenched informal network of male gatekeepers or explicit messages that she was not yet ready for advancement. The universality of that finding across a relatively small sample echoes broader literature on gendered organizational culture, in which informal norms often matter as much as formal policy in determining who rises.

One of the book’s central conceptual contributions is its attention to what the authors call silent saboteurs, the less visible forces that derail women’s advancement. Some of these are external, such as the timing of family formation relative to career ladders, or the subtle signaling that occurs when women are repeatedly passed over for stretch assignments. Others are internal, including the self-doubt and sense of intellectual fraudulence commonly described as impostor syndrome. Psychological research on impostor phenomena has long noted that it is especially prevalent among high-achieving women in fields where they are underrepresented, and that it can suppress applications for promotions even among candidates whose records exceed the stated requirements. By naming these forces explicitly and pairing them with coping strategies, the book treats internalized doubt not as a personal failing but as a predictable response to a professional environment that sends mixed messages about women’s readiness.

The structure of the book mirrors the arc of a leadership journey itself. The opening section diagnoses the barriers, the middle section builds strategies for moving past them, and the closing section turns toward long-term transformation of the field. This progression reflects a deliberate choice to move readers from recognition to action rather than leaving them with a catalogue of grievances. The middle chapters focus on concrete, learnable skills: crafting a compelling resume, understanding how search committees and hiring processes actually operate behind closed doors, negotiating employment contracts, and learning to advocate for oneself without triggering the backlash that assertive women sometimes face. Research on negotiation has repeatedly shown gendered differences in both initiation of negotiation and in how assertiveness is perceived, making explicit instruction in this area a practical necessity rather than an optional refinement.

Self-advocacy receives particular emphasis, and for good reason. Many women in education have been socialized into roles that prize supportiveness, collaboration and care for others, qualities that make them effective educators but can work against them in promotion contexts where visibility and self-promotion are rewarded. The authors argue that advocating for oneself can be done authentically and without confrontation, reframing self-advocacy as an act of professional honesty rather than aggression. This reframing matters because studies of workplace advancement consistently find that women who wait to be recognized often wait indefinitely, while those who articulate their accomplishments and aspirations are more likely to be considered for leadership pipelines. The challenge, as the book frames it, is to help women speak up in ways that feel congruent with their values rather than requiring them to adopt a persona that feels foreign.

The final section of the book shifts from individual advancement to collective change, urging readers to think about how their own careers can lay groundwork for the next generation of women leaders. This generational framing reflects a growing emphasis in leadership scholarship on succession and mentorship as mechanisms for durable change. A single woman ascending to a superintendency is significant, but the effects compound when that leader deliberately sponsors other women, reshapes hiring practices, and normalizes flexible arrangements that accommodate caregiving responsibilities. The authors suggest that a changing workforce demographics can be leveraged strategically: as retirements open positions and as the profession’s composition continues to evolve, there are genuine windows of opportunity for women to move into roles that have historically been closed to them.

Another notable feature of the book is its use of first-person accounts from women already serving in educational leadership roles. These contributors describe their paths to their current positions, the missteps they made, the knowledge they wish they had possessed earlier, and the lessons they hope to pass on. Narrative and testimony of this kind serve functions that purely analytical writing cannot. They provide readers with relatable models of success, they normalize the struggles that aspiring leaders may assume are unique to them, and they demonstrate the diversity of routes into leadership, countering the notion that there is a single correct career trajectory. For readers weighing whether to pursue an advanced credential or apply for a first administrative post, such stories can be the difference between aspiration and action.

Although the primary audience is K-12 educators, the authors are explicit that the lessons extend to higher education, where women face parallel patterns of underrepresentation in senior academic and administrative roles. They also see value for pre-service teachers, who can begin building leadership confidence before they ever enter a classroom, and for men in the field who wish to act as genuine allies. The inclusion of male readers is strategically significant, since men still hold a disproportionate share of hiring authority and board influence in school districts. Allyship in this context is not framed as abstract support but as concrete behavior: mentoring women colleagues, ensuring search processes are equitable, interrupting dismissive commentary, and advocating for candidates whose contributions might otherwise be overlooked.

The authors are careful to acknowledge that the landscape has shifted over recent decades, even as inequities persist. Overt sexism and discrimination, they note, are less blatant than they once were, but subtler contextual pressures remain potent. The demands of motherhood intersect with the long and unpredictable hours of administrative work; the absence of visible role models can make leadership feel unattainable; and assumptions about who looks like a superintendent continue to shape search outcomes. Because these forces rarely announce themselves, they can be difficult to name and even harder to challenge, which is why the book invests so heavily in helping readers recognize patterns in their own professional lives. Naming a barrier, the authors suggest, is the first step toward devising a strategy against it.

For the field of educational leadership preparation more broadly, the book arrives at a moment when preparation programs are reexamining how they serve women candidates. The authors’ own program enrolls a majority of women, mirroring national trends in educational administration graduate study, yet the profession’s top ranks have not followed suit. That gap between who is trained for leadership and who actually attains it is a puzzle that preparation programs, professional associations and districts alike are beginning to address through targeted mentoring, equity audits of hiring practices and leadership development cohorts designed specifically for women. Books of this kind can serve as companion texts in such efforts, giving candidates a shared vocabulary for the challenges they face and a set of tested strategies drawn from those who have navigated them successfully.

Ultimately, the book’s title captures its core message: that women in education can pursue and exercise leadership without apologizing for their ambition, their expertise or their priorities. Moving from aspiration to advancement, the authors contend, requires both personal readiness and institutional change, and each woman who makes the journey makes the path easier for those who follow. In a profession where the majority of practitioners are women but the balance of authority is not, that argument carries practical weight for districts seeking to draw on the full talent of their workforces, and for the educators who have long been told, implicitly or explicitly, to wait their turn.

Subject of Research: A guide to advancing women into educational leadership roles

Article Title: New book 'Leading Without Apology' provides guidance to women to advance to educational leadership roles

Article References: New book 'Leading Without Apology' provides guidance to women to advance to educational leadership roles. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: educational leadership, women in education, University of Kansas, school administration, superintendent, impostor syndrome, career advancement, gender equity, K-12 education, mentorship, negotiation, workforce

The research, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, was conducted by a team at the University of Zaragoza that surveyed 1,369 families whose children attend public and state-assisted schools across different Spanish regions. Rather than examining leadership, family involvement, competences and grades in isolation, the researchers built a Structural Equation Model, a sophisticated statistical framework that allows scientists to test how multiple latent constructs, variables that cannot be observed directly, relate to one another simultaneously. The four constructs at the heart of the model were democratic educational leadership, family accompaniment, students’ transversal competences and academic performance as perceived by families.

The leadership construct was deliberately framed in democratic terms. Instead of measuring organisational efficiency or instructional supervision alone, the study captured a relational style of leadership grounded in participation, trust, empathy and transparent communication. Families rated school leaders on indicators such as the ability to communicate confidently, motivate staff, foster a positive climate of coexistence, empathise with the needs of families, teachers and students, and address difficult situations with openness and positivity. This operationalisation reflects a body of theory that distinguishes democratic leadership from transformational, instructional and distributed models, emphasising equity of participation and the active involvement of all stakeholders, including families, in school decision-making.

Family accompaniment, the second pillar of the model, went well beyond conventional notions of parental involvement. It encompassed supporting children’s autonomous learning, attending meetings and tutorials with teachers, encouraging the development of competences, fostering positive attitudes towards learning and promoting study skills at home. Transversal competences, often described as twenty-first-century skills, covered collaboration, autonomy, leadership, technology use, creativity, critical thinking, communication and adaptability. Academic performance, finally, was measured through families’ perceptions of students’ overall achievement, evaluations, marks and progress at school. All indicators were scored on an eleven-point Likert scale running from zero to ten, a format the researchers chose for its sensitivity and its familiarity to families accustomed to standard grading systems.

The technical rigour of the study is considerable. Before testing their theoretical model, the researchers ran confirmatory factor analyses to verify that the measurement structure held together. The combined four-factor model showed strong fit to the data, with a comparative fit index of 0.96, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.05 and a standardised root mean square residual of just 0.03. Internal consistency was high, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from 0.84 for family accompaniment to 0.98 for educational leadership. The team also applied robust maximum likelihood estimation with Satorra-Bentler corrections to guard against non-normality in the data, and compared their four-factor model against a single-factor alternative to rule out common-method variance, a statistical artefact that can arise when all data come from the same informants. The multidimensional model fit far better, supporting the validity of the findings.

When the structural model itself was tested, the results were unambiguous. Educational leadership showed a strong positive effect on students’ academic performance, with a standardised coefficient of 0.54, and an even stronger effect on transversal competences, at 0.73, both statistically significant at the highest threshold. Leadership also predicted family accompaniment, with a coefficient of 0.37, confirming that when school leaders communicate openly and build trust, families become more engaged in their children’s education. In turn, family accompaniment predicted both academic performance and competence development, with coefficients of 0.17 and 0.11 respectively. All five hypotheses of the study were supported by the data.

Perhaps the most intriguing finding lay in the mediation analysis. The researchers demonstrated that family accompaniment significantly mediated the relationship between educational leadership and both outcome variables. In practical terms, this means that part of a school leader’s influence on student success travels through the family: leadership practices that lower barriers between schools and homes create formal and informal opportunities for family involvement, which then reinforces motivation, study habits and engagement in children. Although the indirect effects were modest in magnitude, their statistical significance suggests that even small relational improvements, accumulated across years of school-family interaction, can meaningfully shape educational trajectories. This positions democratic leadership not merely as an administrative function but as a relational process that connects classroom practice with family life.

The descriptive data add nuance to this headline result. Families rated leadership most highly for fostering a positive climate and confident communication, but gave lower marks for empathy towards family needs and for the direct, honest transmission of problems to staff, suggesting a gap in the more demanding empathic dimensions of leadership. Family involvement scored highest for attending meetings with teachers and encouraging positive attitudes, while promoting study habits at home lagged behind. Among transversal competences, autonomy, collaboration and technology skills scored well, but leadership, critical thinking and creativity, the higher-order skills most valued in a rapidly changing economy, remained comparatively weak. Older family members perceived leadership and performance less favourably, while university-educated families reported more positive views of their own accompaniment, and perceptions of competence development dipped in larger schools.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. The cross-sectional design captures associations at a single point in time and cannot establish causation, and the convenience sampling strategy, with voluntary participation, may have attracted more engaged families, potentially inflating positive perceptions. All variables were family-reported rather than drawn from objective academic records, and the study was conducted exclusively in the Spanish context, where cultural expectations about school-family relations may differ from those elsewhere. Yet the sample’s size and heterogeneity, the robustness of the statistical procedures and the consistency of the findings with decades of international research on leadership and parental involvement lend the conclusions considerable weight.

The practical implications are hard to ignore. For policymakers, the study argues for leadership training programmes focused on communication, participation and community engagement rather than managerial technique alone. For school leaders, it recommends creating structured opportunities for family participation, improving communication channels and offering concrete guidance to parents on how to support learning at home. And for families, the message is that their accompaniment is not a peripheral supplement to schooling but an active mechanism through which school quality translates into student achievement. In an era when education systems worldwide are searching for levers to build the skills the future demands, this research suggests that the most powerful lever may be the connection itself, the deliberate, empathetic bridge between those who lead schools and those who raise children.

Beyond its immediate findings, the study sits within a broader international conversation about how school quality should be defined. Global frameworks, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, have pushed education systems to look beyond narrow achievement metrics and to consider whether schools cultivate adaptable, critically minded citizens. Transversal competences occupy a central place in this agenda because they are the capacities that transfer across subjects, jobs and life circumstances. By modelling competence development alongside academic performance, the Spanish research team aligned their work with this wider shift in how educational success is conceptualised and measured.

The mediating role of family accompaniment also carries theoretical weight. Leadership research has long debated whether the influence of school leaders on students is direct or indirect, with several influential reviews suggesting that leaders affect learning primarily by shaping conditions around teaching, such as climate, collaboration and community ties. The present findings fit that indirect-effects perspective: leadership appears to matter partly because it opens relational channels that draw families into the educational process. This reframes family engagement not as an optional add-on but as a mechanism that leadership actively activates or neglects.

The descriptive patterns deserve attention from practitioners. The weaker scores for empathy towards family needs and for candid communication about problems hint that schools may excel at routine, pleasant interactions while struggling with the harder relational work of acknowledging difficulties. Similarly, the lag in home-based study habits suggests that families readily attend formal meetings but find it harder to sustain day-to-day learning support, an area where targeted guidance from schools could prove especially valuable.

Future research could build on these results in several directions. Longitudinal designs would help establish whether leadership practices precede family engagement over time, strengthening causal claims that cross-sectional data cannot deliver. Objective measures of achievement, drawn from school records or standardised assessments, would complement family perceptions. Comparative studies across countries and cultures could test whether the leadership-family pathway holds where expectations about parental roles differ. Qualitative work might also illuminate the concrete interactions, a conversation at pickup, a well-timed phone call, through which democratic leadership translates into family action.

For now, the study’s central contribution is its integrated view. Leadership, families, competences and achievement are not separate levers to be pulled independently; they form a connected system in which the quality of relationships between schools and homes helps determine how effectively everything else works.

Subject of Research: The relationship between democratic educational leadership, family accompaniment, transversal competences and academic performance in school students.

Article Title: Educational leadership for improving transversal competences and academic performance: the mediator role of family accompaniment

Article References: Latorre-Cosculluela, C., Mairal-Llebot, M., Vázquez-Toledo, S., & Rivera-Torres, P. (2026). Educational leadership for improving transversal competences and academic performance: the mediator role of family accompaniment. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00071-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00071-2

Keywords: educational leadership, family accompaniment, transversal competences, academic performance, structural equation modelling, democratic leadership, parental involvement, school improvement, 21st-century skills, education research, school-family collaboration, student outcomes