The Moderating Role of School Level in the Effect of Leadership Styles and School Culture on Teacher Burnout

ABSTRACTTeacher burnout remains a persistent challenge in contemporary education despite ongoing reforms, digital transformation initiatives, and policy-driven improvement efforts. In Türkiye, increasing bureaucratic demands, exam-oriented pressures, and rising expectations for teacher accountability have intensified emotional exhaustion and diminished professional fulfillment. Although leadership and school culture are widely recognized as key determinants of these outcomes, empirical models that simultaneously integrate leadership subdimensions, cultural mechanisms, and contextual moderators remain limited. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates how three transactional leadership styles—active management-by-exception, passive management-by-exception, and reward-based leadership—influence teachers’ emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment through organizational culture, and whether these relationships differ between primary and secondary schools. Using a correlational design, data were collected from 701 teachers working in public schools across the Kastamonu and Bartın provinces. Moderated mediation analyses (Hayes’s PROCESS Models 14 and 59, 5,000 bootstrap samples) were employed to examine the structural pathways. The findings revealed that passive leadership substantially increased emotional exhaustion, particularly in secondary schools, whereas reward-based leadership reduced exhaustion indirectly by strengthening achievement-oriented culture. Both active and reward-based leadership enhanced personal accomplishment through task-oriented culture, while passive leadership undermined accomplishment by weakening achievement- and task-related norms. Overall, the results demonstrate that leadership exerts its influence on burnout primarily through the cultural climate of schools rather than through direct managerial actions alone. These findings offer a novel contribution by presenting one of the first comprehensive models in the Turkish context to jointly test transactional leadership subdimensions, three cultural mediators, and school-level moderation. Practically, the study underscores the importance of cultivating success- and task-oriented environments, implementing transparent and meaningful reward systems, and reducing bureaucratic load—strategies that can support teacher well-being, emotional resilience, and sustainable professional growth.