From leadership research to district action: Students’ School and Psychological Adjustment in Classrooms with Positive and Negative Leaders

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract Positive and negative leadership styles may influence classroom norms and be related to the school and psychological adjustment of children in general, and victims in particular. This study tested the relation between leadership styles and children’s adjustment, and the moderating effects of leadership on the association between self-reported victimization and school and psychological adjustment (self-esteem, social anxiety, and depressive symptoms); and it tested for potential gender differences. Classrooms were classified into those with only positive leaders, only negative leaders, both positive and negative leaders, and without leaders. The sample contained 8748 children (Mage = 10.05, SD = 1.22; 51.2% girls) from 392 classrooms, in grades three to six, in 98 Dutch schools. Multilevel analysis revealed that, in general, children in negative leader classrooms experienced lower school well-being than children in other classrooms. In positive leader classrooms, male and female victims had lower school well-being. For psychological well-being, female victims had lower self-esteem and more depressive symptoms in positive leader classrooms. Male and female victims in negative leader classrooms did not suffer from additional maladjustment. These results demonstrate that negative leadership styles are related to lower school well-being of all children, whereas victimization in classrooms with positive leaders is negatively related to male and female victims’ school well-being and girls’ psychological adjustment (depressive symptoms); this is in line with the ‘healthy context paradox’. Keywords: Leadership, Victimization, Children, Adjustment

Study methods

Data used in this study stem from the KiVa anti-bullying program in the Netherlands, and were all collected in October 2012 (Huitsing et al., 2020; Veenstra et al., 2020). Before the data collection, an information guide and consent forms were sent to parents, with the request to allow their children to participate. Passive parental and student consent was obtained: parents could opt their children out of participation, and children themselves could also opt out of the assessment at any time. The response rate at each wave exceeded 95%. Children completed the questionnaires online in the school computer labs, during regular school hours, under teachers’ guidance, and they could ask teachers for help when necessary. Children who missed the scheduled day of data collection could participate another day within a month. The questions of each scale were presented in random order to avoid the possibility that the order might systematically affect the results.

Limitations

This study has several strengths, including capturing the subtle moderating effects of positive or negative leadership styles on classmates’ well-being in an exceptionally large number of classrooms, and exploring gender differences in the context of the healthy context paradox for victims in particular. Most classrooms had a positive leader (27%), a negative leader (16%), or both (11%), and the study showed that leadership styles had relevant consequences for all children’s school adjustment, and for female victims’ psychological adjustment in particular. Future studies aiming to extend or replicate these findings need a large sample, because essentially the classroom level is the important level of analysis.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Zhe Dong; Gijs Huitsing; René Veenstra. Students’ School and Psychological Adjustment in Classrooms with Positive and Negative Leaders. Journal of Youth and Adolescence (2024-01-06). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-023-01937-w

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.