THE ROLE OF PRINCIPALS’ TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP AND SCHOOL CLIMATE ON TEACHER PERFORMANCE THROUGH WORK MOTIVATION

Abstract

Education quality depends heavily on teacher performance, which directly impacts the learning process and student achievement. While previous studies identify principal leadership, school climate, and work motivation as key determinants, the mediating role of work motivation remains empirically debated. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the influence of transformational principal leadership and school climate on teacher performance, with work motivation serving as a mediating variable, in public elementary schools across Ngadirojo Subdistrict. A quantitative correlational design was employed involving 165 teachers, selected from a population of 280 through a proportionate stratified random sampling technique. Data were collected via closed-ended questionnaires and analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling-Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) approach. The results reveal that transformational principal leadership has a positive and significant direct effect on both work motivation ($\beta$ = 0.388, p < 0.001) and teacher performance ($\beta$ = 0.356, p < 0.001). Similarly, school climate significantly enhances both work motivation ($\beta$ = 0.367, p < 0.001) and teacher performance ($\beta$ = 0.382, p < 0.001). Conversely, work motivation does not significantly affect teacher performance ($\beta$ = 0.150, p = 0.070) and subsequently fails to mediate the relationships between the organizational variables and performance. These findings conclude that, within this specific educational context, the direct structural interventions of effective leadership and a conducive school climate drive teacher performance more robustly than the psychological mechanism of internal work motivation.