Toward Sustainable Schools: A Mixed Methods Approach to Investigating Distributed Leadership, Organizational Happiness, and Quality of Work Life in Preschools

Previous research shows that sustainable organization conditions are associated with high levels of teacher well-being. Organizational happiness and quality of work life, two indicators of teacher well-being in an organization, impact the outcomes of teachers and organizations. Determining ways to support the organizational happiness and quality of work life variables in the organizational environment are gaining significance. Distributed leadership has attracted attention in the literature with its principles. Adopting a sequential explanatory design, qualitative data were collected after quantitative data. In the quantitative component, it was hypothesized that organizational happiness could play a mediating role in the relation between distributed leadership and quality of work life. This was tested through structural equation modeling, and the findings indicated that organizational happiness had a full mediation effect. In the qualitative component, the opinions of administrators regarding the effects of their behaviors on organizational happiness and quality of work life of teachers were investigated within the scope of distributed leadership. The results indicated that administrators’ own behaviors in the school context displayed distributed leadership characteristics.