Principal leadership strategies for cultivating teachers’ professional care in Indonesian primary schools: A multiple-case study

Abstract

Background—Teacher professional care in this study is defined as the integration of functional responsibility (e.g., preparation, punctuality, and completion of assigned duties) with relational and ethical responsiveness to pupils and colleagues. Although principal leadership is widely associated with teacher performance and school climate, less is known about how connected leadership processes cultivate this broader form of care across primary-school contexts. Objectives—This study examined how principals plan, enact, evaluate, and refine leadership strategies intended to strengthen teachers’ professional care. Methods—A qualitative multiple-case study was conducted from May to August 2026 in five public primary schools in Muaro Jambi, Indonesia. Ten participants—five principals and five teachers—were purposively selected. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations, and school documents and analysed through a mixed deductive–inductive thematic procedure combining within-case analysis and cross-case comparison. Informant bias was mitigated by seeking concrete incident-based accounts, comparing principal and teacher perspectives, checking interview summaries with participants, and requiring major interpretations to be supported by more than one source or method. Results—Across cases, professional care was strongest where principals combined clear expectations with credible modelling, developmental supervision, psychologically safe two-way communication, continuous professional learning, and distributed participation. Evaluation functioned not merely as control but as reflective follow-up that linked observed practice to differentiated support. Conclusion—The findings suggest that leadership enables professional care through a recursive organisational process in which accountability, relational trust, professional learning, and shared responsibility reinforce one another.