Resign or carry‐on? District and principal leadership as drivers of change in teacher turnover intentions during the COVID‐19 crisis: A latent growth model examination

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers in the United States, an already at-risk occupation group, experienced new work-related stressors, safety concerns, and work-life challenges, magnifying on-going retention concerns. Integrating | 689 CHANGES IN TURNOVER INTENTIONS ( James et al., 2011), but there is no consensus around what key leader behaviours are needed during a crisis or the role of different leadership levels (e.g., senior, first-line; Bundy et al., 2017). Moreover, the dynamic nature of employees' responses to on-going crises have not been considered (Bundy et al., 2017;Williams et al., 2017), hindering understanding of how employees' changing responses during crisis eventually link to attrition. Thus, research is sorely needed to examine how leader actions across multiple levels relate to employees' dynamic responses during landscape-scale crises, like that created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Doing so would provide organizations with needed evidence-based recommendations and guide further theory development and refinement in crisis management.We use a latent growth modeling (LGM) approach to assess how teacher experiences (i.e., safety concerns, work-life balance) and turnover intentions change over the course of a semester during COVID-19, as a function of leadership actions at the start of the semester. We rely on COVID-19 guidance (McKinsey & Company, 2020) to identify leader actions at two levels (district decision-making and safety communication; principal 1 authoritarian leadership and warmth) that may set the course for teachers' responses. We examine whether leader actions at each level relate to initial teacher turnover intentions at the start of the 2020-2021 school year through their influence on safety concerns and work-life balance, two primary COVID-19 challenges (Kraft et al., 2021;Lizana & Vega-Fernadez, 2021). We expect that district leadership influences teacher retention through structural mechanisms (i.e., district safety practices), whereas principal leadership exert influence through more interpersonal mechanisms (i.e., family support and work-family balance). Further, we theorize that leader actions not only trigger initial employee responses but also set the stage for on-going crisis response. Effective leader actions early on may begin a resource spiral (Hobfoll, 2011) or an accumulation of positive outcomes over time (Williams et al., 2017), which may be especially influential in the context of a crisis (Hobfoll et al., 2018). Thus, we also examine changes in turnover intentions, over the course of the Fall 2020 semester, as a function of initial leader actions and the semester-long trajectories in safety and work-life balance experiences they incite. In sum, our goals are to explain (a) why teachers intended to turnover at the start of the semester, and (b) what factors related to changes in turnover intentions during the semester. To do this, we surveyed 617 U.S. teachers every 2 weeks from August to December 2020.We contribute to occupational health, crisis management, and ...

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