BECE. Newsletter 

Vol.6, No.1, 2020 800 

 

 

 

 

The Role of Teachers’ Social-Emotional Beliefs and 

Teacher-Student Relationship in the Effects of Princi-

pals’ Authentic Leadership on Students’ Social-

Emotional Competence 

By Zhang, S., Mao, Y.Q. 

 

Correspondence to: Mao, Y.Q. Email: maoyaqing@bnu.edu.cn 

HE authentic leadership of the principal refers to the positive psycholog-

ical ability and moral values of the principal in the work interaction with 

teachers. In a district of Beijing, Zhang and Mao chose stratified sam-

pling to select 9 public primary schools and distributed a total of 900 teacher 

questionnaires. Combined with the principal questionnaire and the student 

questionnaire, they investigated the teacher’s social-emotional belief, the 

principal’s honest leadership, the students’ social-emotional ability, and the 

close relationship between teachers and students. All the questionnaires 

adopted a 5-level Likert scale. Among them, students’ social-emotional abil-

ity includes six dimensions: self-cognition, self-management, others’ cogni-

tion, others’ management, collective cognition, and collective management. 

Teachers’ social-emotional beliefs include three dimensions: learning adapt-

ability, commitment and support culture. The results show that: 

 The authentic leadership of principals has a significant positive ef-

fect on students’ social affective ability. 

 Teachers’ social emotions and beliefs close relationship between 

teachers and students and the leadership of the headmaster integrity 

students play a role of independent mediation between social-

emotional ability, which shows the principal authentic leadership, in 

addition to playing a direct role of social emotions, can influence 

teachers’ social emotions and close relationship between teachers 

and students. 

 Teachers’ social affective belief and intimate teacher-student rela-

tionship play a chain of mediating roles between principals’ authen-

tic leadership and students’ social affective ability. In other words, 

principals’ authentic leadership affects teachers’ social affective be-

liefs, further affects an intimate teacher-student relationship, and fi-

nally affects students’ social affective ability. 
Source: Global Education, 2020; 49(6):113-128. 

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