Owing to the unprecedented challenges brought about by the global pandemic and neoliberal reforms, it is critical for school leaders to help teachers navigate through chaos and stay emotionally healthy. From a sample of 449 primary and secondary school teachers in mainland China, we constructed a multi-mediator model to explore the direct effect of servant leadership on teachers’ emotional well-being, as well as the mediating effects of teacher recognition and emotion regulation. The results reveal that servant leadership is positively related to teachers’ emotional well-being directly and indirectly through reappraisal and recognition of social esteem. The findings also indicate that the mediating effects of suppression and recognition for care are not significant. The implications for the field and future directions are discussed.

Neo-liberal reforms have triggered the emergence of new professionalism of teachers. This study adopts the perspective of inhabited institutionalism theory and proposes that teachers are not passively influenced by the new professionalism but that they can also respond to it differently based on their own sense-making. Using in-depth interview data from Chinese high school teachers, this study finds that two contradictory but coexisting forms of managerial professionalism strongly influence teachers: examination-oriented professionalism and quality-oriented professionalism. Meanwhile, three patterns of teachers’ reactions to externally-imposed professionalism are identified: ‘Why bother?’, ‘Struggling’, and ‘Meaningless’. The findings provoke further discussion of the potential influence of teachers’ responses to the new professionalism and professional development.

Given the significant influence of managerial reforms in education fields, how to promote teacher professionalism appears to be a priority task for school leaders. This study examined the mediation role of teacher recognition on the association between transformative leadership and teacher professionalism. From a sample of 1196 primary and secondary school teachers nested in 98 schools from mainland China, this study used the multilevel structuration equation model to explore the associations among the study variables on both the teacher level and school level simultaneously. On the teacher level, the results showed that transformative leadership was positively related to teacher professionalism and verified the mediation role of teacher recognition for social esteem. On the school level, transformative leadership was associated with teacher professionalism through the mediation role of recognition for care. This study suggests that transformative leadership may influence teacher professionalism via teacher recognition on both individual and school levels, while the influence mechanism could be different.