Instructional Leadership, Teaching Empowerment, and School Resources: Pathways to Teacher Performance through Self-Efficacy
Abstract
Teacher performance is central to learning quality, yet Indonesian secondary schools continue to face uneven leadership practice, limited resources, and heavy teaching loads. Evidence on whether school resources strengthen teachers’ confidence, and on whether workload changes the link between confidence and performance, remains inconsistent. This study examined the effects of instructional leadership, teaching empowerment, and school resources on teacher performance, with teacher self-efficacy as a mediator and teaching workload as a moderator. A quantitative explanatory survey was conducted among 190 teachers of public and private senior high schools (SMA) and vocational high schools (SMK) in Tangerang Regency, Indonesia, selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected with an online questionnaire of 38 five-point Likert items and analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS 4 with 5,000 bootstrap subsamples. Instructional leadership (β = 0.277, p = 0.010) and teaching empowerment (β = 0.467, p < 0.001) had significant positive effects on teacher self-efficacy, whereas school resources did not (β = 0.073, p = 0.451). Teacher self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of teacher performance (β = 0.685, p < 0.001), and instructional leadership also affected performance directly (β = 0.239, p = 0.001). Self-efficacy partially mediated the effect of instructional leadership on performance and transmitted the whole effect of teaching empowerment, for which no direct path was specified. Teaching workload did not moderate the self-efficacy–performance relationship (β = −0.034, p = 0.543). The model explained 57.9% of the variance in self-efficacy and 79.8% in performance. The findings position teacher self-efficacy as the central psychological mechanism linking organizational support to teaching performance and suggest that principals and the district education office would gain more from investing in teacher empowerment and instructional leadership development than in physical facilities alone.