Effects of contingent and noncontingent rewards on the relationship between worker satisfaction and task performance: A field study

Abstract

Positive psychology has recently gained interests among educational researchers due to its role in improving interpersonal relationships and offering a new research framework (Hoy & Tarter, 2011) among various positive psychological concepts in educational context, authentic leadership, teachers’ work engagement and teachers’ academic optimism are three of the highly explored. Authentic leadership deals with a principal's desire to understand oneself and others and act in accordance with his/her core values in order to lead the school to success (Avolio & Mhatre, 2011; Gardner, Cogliser, Davis, & Dickens, 2011). While teachers’ work engagement concerns with how much a teacher is involved and enthusiastic about his or her work (Bakker and Bal, 2010, Klassen et al., 2012), teacher's academic optimism is a teacher's belief that he or she can teach all of the students effectively, stress the importance of learning and trust in students and parents (Beard, Hoy, & Woolfolk Hoy, 2010; Woolfolk Hoy, Hoy, & Kurz, 2008). Although authentic leadership and teachers’ work engagement have been found to be positively related (Bird, Chuang, Watson, & Murray, 2012; Wang & Bird, 2011), so far there have been no studies that focused on the relationships among the three. Furthermore, since school size has a significant impact on various school outcomes particularly the interpersonal processes (Crosnoe, Johnson, & Elder Jr, 2004; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2009), we hypothesized that school size would moderate the aforementioned relationships. The purpose of the study was to propose a conceptual model linking authentic leadership, teachers’ work engagement and academic optimism with school size as a moderator. Several research propositions based on the model are presented. The proposed model is expected to be a valuable tool for conducting related future researches and developing initiatives to improve principal authentic leadership in school.