From leadership research to district action: Perceived school-wide teacher-student relations and teacher job satisfaction: An affective events theory analysis of Shanghai teachers

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 Teachers’ perceptions of teacher-student relations in their school are linked to their job satisfaction, but whether positive teaching-related emotion constitutes a statistical indirect association between them, and whether school leadership context alters it, remains unclear. Using Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2024 data for Shanghai (China), this study analyzed the OECD scales for teacher-student relations, joy of teaching, job satisfaction, and principal relational leadership in 1,338 teachers from 205 schools. A conditional process regression adjusted for teacher demographic and career characteristics; point estimates used the final teacher weight, and sampling variance was estimated from 100 Fay balanced repeated replication weights. Perceived school-wide teacher-student relations were positively associated with job satisfaction, and the indirect association through joy of teaching was supported. Principal relational leadership did not significantly alter the conditional direct association, whereas its interaction with joy of teaching was positive; this interaction was not reproduced when the constructs were scored as simple item means, so the moderation result is reported as exploratory. The pattern is consistent with the work environment-emotion-work attitude linkage proposed by Affective Events Theory. Conclusions are restricted to lower-secondary teachers in Shanghai and offer leads for longitudinal and intervention research.

Study methods

The study uses the teacher public-use file of TALIS 2024, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The target population comprises ISCED 2 teachers in Shanghai (China). TALIS employs a stratified probability design with schools and teachers within schools as the two sampling stages; the analysis uses the OECD final teacher weight for point estimation and the teacher replicate weights for variance estimation, so that the estimand remains consistent with the survey design [45].

Limitations

First, the study is cross-sectional and the focal variables were measured concurrently, so temporal ordering cannot be established, and both reverse and reciprocal associations remain possible. Teachers with higher job satisfaction may, for example, evaluate teacher-student relations, teaching experience, and principal leadership more favorably. Future work should use longitudinal designs with at least three waves that measure the relational environment, teaching emotion, and work attitudes separately, or apply cross-lagged, random-intercept cross-lagged, or natural experiment designs.

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

Mengting Qian; Chunshun Yan; Xinyi Wang. Perceived school-wide teacher-student relations and teacher job satisfaction: An affective events theory analysis of Shanghai teachers. PLOS One (2026-09-03). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357279

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.