Purpose: Principal leadership is an important external environmental factor that affects and alleviates teachers' job burnout. The purpose of this paper is to explore the deep internal mechanisms of the influence of principal transformational leadership on teacher job burnout in the context of Chinese teachers.Design/methodology/approach: A cluster sampling method was used to conduct a questionnaire survey on 990 elementary school teachers in 14 primary schools in Beijing. This study uses a structural equation model to analyze the chain intermediary effect of social-emotional competence and the student-teacher relationship between transformational leadership and teachers' job burnout.Findings: The results reveal that transformational leadership has a significant negative predictive effect on teachers' job burnout; this kind of leadership affects teachers' job burnout through a chain intermediary effect of social and emotional competence and student-teacher relationship.Originality/value: This research has discovered that teacher burnout is the result of the interaction of external environmental and individual internal factors. Transformational leadership, as an external environmental factor, positively predicts the internal social-emotional competence of the teacher, and then the teacher's internal social-emotional competence positively predicts the external student-teacher relationship. Finally, the teacher-student relationship of the external environment negatively predicts the job burnout of internal individual teachers.

Teacher social-emotional competence plays a crucial role in teacher professional development as it is associated with effective stress alleviation at work. However, how and under what conditions teacher social-emotional competence contributes to job burnout is a black box. This study aimed to explored the impact of teacher social-emotional competence on job burnout, focusing on the chain mediation effects of teacher-student relationships and teacher well-being. For this undertaking, stratified random sampling was used and the questionnaire was filled out by 990 teachers in 14 primary schools in Beijing. We analyzed these data using structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings suggested that the teacher social-emotional competence and job burnout were negatively correlated, verifying that teacher social-emotional competence can influence job burnout through the separate and chain mediation effects of teacher-student relationship and teacher well-being. In addition, the separate mediation role of the teacher-student relationship had the most significant effect of all mediation paths. To alleviate teacher job burnout and promote the sustainability of teachers’ professional development, we suggested that emphasizing the development of teacher social-emotional competence and the sustained enhancement of teacher well-being, as well as focusing on improving teacher-student relationship.

Knowledge sharing is a fundamental resource for enhancing the competitiveness of schools. However, in many Chinese schools, there is a low level of teacher knowledge sharing. To address this issue, this study aimed to explain teacher knowledge sharing through principal authentic leadership, reciprocal norms, and organizational trust. Data from 4,524 teachers in 16 provinces in mainland China were analyzed using a structural equation model and bootstrapping tests. The results revealed that principal authentic leadership had a positive association with teacher knowledge sharing. Reciprocity norms and organizational trust not only served as independent mediators between authentic leadership and teachers’ knowledge sharing but also played a chain-mediating role. Moreover, the separate mediating effect of organizational trust was the most significant, accounting for 29.17% of the total effect. This study underscores the importance of authentic leadership, reciprocal norms, and organizational trust and provides recommendations for school management practices.

The study aims to validate the Chinese version of Personal Accountability Measure (PAM-Ch), which is used to assess the subjective aspect of teacher accountability, by surveying 1146 teachers enrolled in professional development courses offered by a public university in Beijing. The validation process involved two phases. First, the samples were randomly divided into three subgroups—for subgroup 1 (n = 390), exploratory factor analysis was computed; for subgroup 2 (n = 359), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was computed; and, for subgroup 3 (n = 381), a new CFA was performed for cross-validation. Second, Cronbach’s α, composite reliability (CR), average variance extracted (AVE), maximum shared variance (MSV), and average shared variance (ASV) were calculated for testing the reliability and validity. Throughout the process, three measurement models were tested for the adaptation of the PAM-Ch in this study. The results found that Model 2 was the best fit for the data, whose factor loadings ranged from 0.72–0.95 for internal accountability (factor 1) and 0.75–0.89 for external accountability (factor 2). The CRs of these two factors were 0.963 and 0.916, respectively, and the AVE values were 0.790 and 0.645, respectively, indicating that the PAM-Ch is a reliable and valid measure.

Knowledge sharing among teachers is a core resource for building the competitiveness of school organizations. At present, school administrators pay more and more attention to building a knowledge-sharing platform for teachers and try to improve the level of knowledge sharing among teachers. However, in reality, the knowledge sharing among teachers in Chinese primary and secondary schools is still at a low level. In the school context, it is worth exploring how to effectively stimulate teachers’ knowledge-sharing. This study builds a research framework based on Bandura’s reciprocal determinism, and the results of an empirical study of 628 teachers in Beijing, China, found that (1) principal authentic leadership significantly positive predicted teacher knowledge sharing; (2) teachers’ social-emotional competence played a significant role in promoting teacher knowledge sharing; (3) teachers’ social-emotional competence played a partially mediating role between authentic leadership and teacher knowledge sharing, the mediating effect was 31.81%.