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The Mediating Role of Servant Leadership in the Relationship Between Working Conditions and Teacher Attrition Intentions in Post-pandemic Urban Schools

Dissertation
2026

Repository

Description

The purpose of this quantitative, nonexperimental mediation study is to examine the relationship between working conditions and teacher attrition intentions. The study tests servant leadership as a mediating mechanism among public school teachers working in post-pandemic urban schools. Grounded in servant leadership theory, this study is designed to move beyond descriptive associations by examining how leadership behaviors may explain the way teachers experience and respond to their working conditions. The study uses secondary data from the 2020-2021 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS), a nationally representative dataset administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that captures information related to teachers’ working conditions, perceptions of school leadership, and career intentions. The target population for this study consists of public school teachers working in urban school settings during the post-pandemic period. Working conditions serve as the independent variable, servant leadership, operationalized as a composite variable derived from NTPS leadership-related items, functions as the mediating variable, and teacher attrition intentions represent the dependent variable. Regression-based analyses were conducted using the NCES DataLab platform to examine direct and indirect relationships among working conditions, servant leadership, and teacher attrition intentions. Descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analyses wereused to assess the proposed mediation model while accounting for the complex survey design of the NTPS dataset. By examining servant leadership as an explanatory mechanism, this study seeks to contribute empirical evidence that informs leadership practice and retention efforts in postpandemic urban schools
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Record Data:

Program :
  • Doctor of Education
Location :
  • CBE
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