The role of principals’ pedagogical leadership practice in predicting teachers’ psychological empowerment: the case of East Gojjam province, Ethiopia

Recently, pedagogical leadership has been regarded as an effective style in the education sector across the globe. Even if practicing pedagogical leadership makes capital available to foster teachers’ psychological empowerment, no previous study has done on this issue so far in the context of Ethiopia. Thus, this research was undertaken to explore the role of principals’ pedagogical leadership practice in predicting teachers’ psychological empowerment, in terms of teachers’ sense of meaning, competence, influence and goal internalization. The correlational survey model design was used. This study was conducted in East Gojjam province, Ethiopia. Data were collected from 420 teachers through the questionnaire and analyzed through SPSS 25. The validity and reliability of the pedagogical leadership and psychological empowerment scale were checked. As a result, according to the views of teachers, the results of simple correlation analyses showed there were a moderate to strong, positive and significant relationships between each dimension of pedagogical leadership and each dimension of psychological empowerment. Finally, principals’ practices of pedagogical leadership significantly predicted teachers’ psychological empowerment. In addition to, its contribution to the theory and literature, this study also empirically highlighted that to make teachers psychologically empowered; and developing various capitals of teachers should be considered.