Building collaborative structures for teachers’ autonomy and self-efficacy: The mediating role of participative management and learning culture

This study focused on the collaborative structure-building behavior of school principals and examined how such behavior affects teacher empowerment. More important, it tested the mediating effects of participative management and learning culture. By collecting nested data from 104 schools in Hong Kong and adopting multilevel structural equation modeling, we found that teachers’ sense of autonomy and self-efficacy were correlated at the individual level but were independent at the school level. The effect of building collaborative structures on teachers’ self-efficacy was mediated by both participative management and learning culture, whereas the effect on autonomy was mediated by participative management only. The findings contribute to the literature in at least 2 ways. First, the inclusion of both principal leadership and school-level factors provides more refined predications of teacher empowerment. Second, the testing of the theory-grounded hypotheses in an Asian society verifies the validity of certain cultural assertions about this region. Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis.