From leadership research to district action: Determinants of job performance among secondary school teachers in Vietnam: evidence from a mixed-methods study

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 Introduction This study examined how individual and organizational factors are associated with the job performance of secondary school teachers in Vietnam, with particular attention to self-efficacy, resilience, principal support, and burnout. Methods An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was employed. In the quantitative phase, survey data from 536 secondary school teachers were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and multiple linear regression. In the qualitative phase, 16 semi-structured interviews were conducted to explain and elaborate the statistical patterns identified in the survey results. Results The quantitative findings showed that self-efficacy was the strongest positive predictor of job performance, followed by resilience and principal support, whereas burnout was negatively associated with performance. The qualitative findings provided deeper insight into these relationships. Teachers linked strong performance to pedagogical competence, adaptability, and confidence in managing classroom demands. They also described supportive leadership, peer collaboration, and collegial sharing as important conditions that helped sustain professional functioning. By contrast, burnout was associated mainly with administrative workload and documentation pressures rather than with teaching itself. Discussion Taken together, the findings suggest that improving teacher performance in Vietnam requires a dual strategy: strengthening teachers’ professional capacity and restructuring school governance processes to reduce administrative overload and foster more supportive school environments. Keywords: job performance, mixed methods, resilience, school governance, self-efficacy, teacher burnout

Study methods

This study was grounded in pragmatism, a philosophical stance that supports the use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches when they are needed to address a research problem comprehensively. In line with this perspective, the study adopted a mixed-methods design to examine how individual and organizational factors were associated with the job performance of secondary school teachers in Vietnam. Mixed methods research is particularly appropriate when neither quantitative nor qualitative evidence alone is sufficient to capture both the general patterns and the contextual meanings of a phenomenon (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Johnson et al., 2007).

Limitations

This study has several limitations. First, the quantitative strand relied on cross-sectional data, which limits the ability to make temporal or causal claims. Second, the study used self-reported measures, which may be subject to response bias. Third, although the qualitative phase added interpretive depth, the findings remain shaped by the institutional and regional contexts included in the study.

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

Quoc Giang Tran; Thi Tuyet Hanh Nguyen; Tan Dat Truong. Determinants of job performance among secondary school teachers in Vietnam: evidence from a mixed-methods study. Frontiers in Sociology (2026-05-22). https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2026.1836374

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.