Purpose: This study aims to understand of the role that teacher entrepreneurial behavior plays in developing teacher professional capital. The extant concepts around school leadership mostly encompass the transformative and instructional roles of school leaders in managing, mobilizing and supporting teachers for student achievement. However, school leadership has not focused strongly on promoting innovation and risk-taking for schools in a knowledge economy. As a timely promising response to the increasingly demanding and competitive school context, teacher entrepreneurial behaviour (TEB), which emphasizes teachers' willingness to take risks and be daring, has started to gain recognition in the school leadership literature, yet a nuanced understanding of TEB's potential impacts on schools is lacking.Design/methodology/approach: Based on a combined consideration of institutionalized recognition and expert judgement, this study identified three innovative entrepreneurial teachers/teacher groups that had won the most competitive teaching award in Hong Kong. Employing a multiple-site case study design, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 informants and collected supplementary school documents and records.Findings: This study found that TEB enables the implementation of innovation and promotes cross-subject alignment. It cultivates trusting and coherent relationships among teachers. Teachers with TEB scaled up innovation among other teachers. Furthermore, entrepreneurial teachers enhance school attractiveness by creating competitive advantages.Originality/value: This analysis showed that TEB enables formal and informal school leaders to bring forth critical school outcomes. This study elaborates how TEB enhances teachers' professional capital through building trusting and coherent relationships. It also adds to the research on school innovation by demonstrating that TEB fosters teachers' capacity for bottom-up innovation in the community.

The promotion of teacher entrepreneurial behavior (TEB) is important for advancing educational change and innovation in schools. However, the principals’ role in facilitating TEB has not been conceptualized in the context of educational leadership theory. This study investigates teachers’ perceptions of principal leadership in cultivating TEB. Using a case study approach, we show how entrepreneurial teachers actualized innovative school-based curriculums in three successful schools. Several principal leadership practices were found to support the teachers when performing TEB. These results further underscore the use of connective pathways by principals for empowering entrepreneurial teachers.

Limited but increasing research has noted that middle leaders (MLs) play a crucial role in structuring a supportive working environment to help entrepreneurial teachers transform educational innovation into practice. This study aims to increase understanding of the extent to which MLs with different levels of experience influence teacher entrepreneurial behaviour (TEB). The study employs the three dimensions of the ‘person-environment fit model,’ namely, person-organisation fit, person-group fit, and personjob fit, as a theoretical lens to examine the relationships among MLs, working environment, and TEB. Findings revealed that the more years of experience MLs have in post, the more influence they have in promoting TEB; however, they have limited influence over shaping the working environment, especially the person-organisation environment. Furthermore, the mediating effect of the person-environment fit model was complex because teacher entrepreneurial behaviour was perceived to be a result of the synergy between the person-group and person-job environment. The findings advance knowledge about middle-leadership and teacher-entrepreneurial behaviour across the three dimensions of the person-environment fit model. They also highlight the importance of MLs' leading experience for TEB and further enrich the understanding of how MLs struggle to support TEB in a hierarchical working environment.