The Relationship Between Principal’s Transformational Leadership, Collective Teacher Efficacy, and Preschool Teacher Career Resilience: A Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

This study aimed to investigate the relationships and underlying mechanisms among principal’s transformational leadership, collective teacher efficacy, and preschool teacher career resilience at the school organizational level. Grounded in social cognitive theory, multilevel structural equation modeling was employed to analyze data collected from 802 preschool teachers across 71 kindergartens in Zhejiang Province, China. The results showed that between-school variance in preschool teacher career resilience accounted for 7.2% to 11.0% of the total variance. At the school level, principal’s transformational leadership directly and positively predicted preschool teacher career resilience (β = 0.538). Furthermore, principal’s transformational leadership was indirectly associated with preschool teacher career resilience through collective teacher efficacy, which partially mediated this relationship (indirect effect = 0.319). These findings suggest that transformational leadership serves as a critical organizational resource for enhancing preschool teacher career resilience, and that this effect is partially achieved by strengthening collective teacher efficacy. Accordingly, optimizing principal leadership practices and fostering collective teacher efficacy may effectively promote preschool teacher career resilience.