The effect of servant leadership on ad hoc schoolteachers’ affective commitment and psychological well-being: The mediating role of psychological capital

Abstract

Progress on the fourth United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4), which strives to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education”, can only be made with teachers whose levels of job satisfaction and dedication to teaching are high. The authors of this article conducted a survey among ad hoc teachers (also referred to as para teachers) in rural India. The purpose of their study was to find out the extent to which being led by principals who practised a management style termed servant leadership positively impacted respondents’ affective commitment and psychological well-being. A servant leader seeks to serve by developing the followers’ selfhood in various relational, ethical, emotional and spiritual contexts. This has the effect of encouraging the followers to become the best version of themselves. Data collection involved the completion of a questionnaire by a sample of 1,120 (840 female, 280 male) para teachers from 17 non-formal community learning centres and 10 schools in the Indian state of Jharkhand. The results of the survey revealed that there is an indirect effect of servant leadership on affective commitment and psychological well-being through a set of three elements, hope, efficacy and resilience, which together amount to a para teacher’s personal resource of psychological capital. Relying on the findings of their research, the authors suggest that it will be beneficial for Jharkhand’s Department of Education to implement interventional teacher training programmes which nurture servant leadership among school principals and educational officers and thereby foster psychological capital among para teachers.