From leadership research to district action: The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Relationship Between School Principals’ Sustainable Leadership Behaviors and Diversity Management Skills

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:

The purpose of this research is to examine the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between school principals’ sustainable leadership behaviors and their diversity management skills. For this purpose, this research, which was designed in the relational survey model, was carried out on teachers. The data of the study were collected using the “Sustainable Leadership Scale,” “Diversity Management Scale,” and “Emotional Intelligence Scale.” Descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, t-test, one-way ANOVA analyses and structural equation model were used in the analysis of the data. As a result of the research, it was found that the school principals’ sustainable leadership behavior levels, their ability to manage differences and their emotional intelligence levels were high according to teacher perceptions. According to the correlation analysis, it was found that there is a positive and significant relationship between sustainable leadership, diversity management, and emotional intelligence. In addition, path analyses to examine the mediator variable effect revealed that emotional intelligence has a full mediating role in the relationship between school principals’ sustainable leadership behaviors and their diversity management skills. In addition to the research, it was also examined whether teachers perceptions of school principals on sustainable leadership behaviors, diversity management skills, and emotional intelligence levels differ significantly according to teachers’ gender, professional seniority, educational status and the level of education they work in. In addition to this, they have shown that they need to use their emotional intelligence effectively.

Study methods

This research, which examines the relationships between school principals’ sustainable leadership behaviors, diversity management skills, and emotional intelligence levels according to teachers’ perceptions, was designed in the relational survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. In this study, the mediating role of emotional intelligence in the relationship between sustainable leadership and diversity management was tested.

Limitations

This research has some limitations. The research was conducted in public schools in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city. A similar research can be done with teachers working in rural schools or private schools where fewer teachers work, and the results can be compared. Self-report data collection tools were used to collect the data of the study. Therefore, the data obtained are limited to the answers given by the participants to the measurement tools and the scope of the measurement tools. Considering this limitation, it is thought that it would be beneficial to use different methods such as observation and interview in future studies.

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

Semih Çayak; Menekşe Eskici. The Mediating Role of Emotional Intelligence in the Relationship Between School Principals’ Sustainable Leadership Behaviors and Diversity Management Skills. Frontiers in Psychology (2021-12-23). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.774388

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.