The success of schools is strongly associated with the principals’ work. School principals are faced with a broad array of tasks and responsibilities, such as handling core administration, staff management and professional development, ensuring learning and promoting students’ academic outcomes, and dealing with the demands of various stakeholders (Doyle Fosco, 2022). Recently, scholars have recognized the importance of having healthy and well-functioning school principals for overall school effectiveness. However, research on school principal well-being and its risk (i.e., job demands) and protecting factors (i.e., personal and job resources) is still scarce and fragmented leaving the field underdeveloped, especially in the European research context in the three countries involved in this project: Croatia, Romania, and Switzerland. Thus, the aim of our project is to understand how school principals can maintain high levels of well-being and how they can successfully activate their resources and handle the demands of their jobs. In exploring a multifaceted concept of school principal well-being, we will use the well-established Job Demands-Resources Theory (JD-R, Bakker et al., 2023) and the Conservation of Resources Theory (COR, Hobfoll, 1989) and collect data from both school principals and teachers to gain insight into perspectives of different responsible actors with the schools.
Specifically, the project aims to investigate: 1) specific job characteristics (i.e., demands and resources) that are shaping school principal well-being; 2) how school principals enhance and maintain their resources (personal and job-related); 3) existence of resource caravans (i.e., resource gain and loss cycles) in school principals.
All three objectives will be addressed by examining the cross-national differences between Swiss, Croatian, and Romanian school principals. The research objectives will be reached in a two-phase process. In the first phase, we will conduct a 4-wave longitudinal study involving at least 220 school principals (and teachers from their schools) from each participating country. In the second phase, we will conduct a 10-days daily diary study on a sample of at least 130 school principals from each participating country. The project results will advance theory building and research as they provide new knowledge regarding the dynamic and interrelated character of well-being at work and inform practice.
