Predicting Early Childhood Teachers’ Job Satisfaction by Pedagogical Leadership: A Moderated Mediation Model of Workload Stress and Professional Collaboration

The pedagogical leadership practices of early childhood education (ECE) centre leaders are acknowledged as pivotal in balancing job demands and job resources for ECE teachers. However, the underlying mechanisms through which pedagogical leadership fosters teachers’ job satisfaction remain underexplored. Guided by the job demands-resources model, this study aimed to investigate the relationship between teachers’ perceptions of centre leaders’ pedagogical leadership and teachers’ job satisfaction, and to examine the potential moderated mediation effects of teacher workload stress and professional collaboration. Data were drawn from the Teaching and Learning International Survey Starting Strong 2018 dataset, encompassing 8,846 teachers across eight participating countries. The results indicated that pedagogical leadership significantly and positively predicted teachers’ job satisfaction, with this relationship being partially mediated by teacher workload stress. Professional collaboration exerted a moderating role in buffering the negative impact of workload stress on teachers’ job satisfaction in most participating countries. These findings highlight the urgency of supporting ECE teachers by alleviating excessive work stress and enhancing their professional collaboration skills, and thereby we recommend cultivating a collaborative working atmosphere to safeguard teachers’ well-being.