Principals’ Transformational Leadership and Kindergarten Teachers’ Career Calling: The Mediating Roles of Organizational Identification and Leader-Member Exchange

Abstract

Perceiving a calling toward one’s career can provide kindergarten teachers sufficient internal motivation to resist massive job burnout and obtain high-level performance and well-being. Given the important role of leadership on followers’ career calling, the present study takes the multilevel approach to examine the cross-level impact of team-level transformational leadership (TFL) of principals on the individual-level career calling of kindergarten teachers. Moreover, according to the identity-capability-reward (ICR) model, the present study investigates the mediating effects of kindergarten teachers’ organizational identification and leader-member exchange (LMX) from the social identity and social exchange perspectives to explain why TFL could positively predict kindergarten teachers’ career calling. Data were collected from 486 teachers at 57 kindergartens in China. Applying the multilevel analysis, results showed that principals’ TFL could positively predict kindergarten teachers’ sense of career calling, in which teachers’ organizational identification and exchange quality with principals played the full mediating effects. These findings extend previous studies and provide practical implications to enhance kindergarten teachers’ career calling.