Leading Under Constraint: A Qualitative Study of School Principals’ Identity and Practice in Albania

School leadership has been widely recognized as a key factor influencing school effectiveness; however, evidence from post-communist and transition contexts remains limited. This study explores how school principals in Albania’s pre-university education system conceptualize and enact school leadership within a socio-economic environment characterized by structural constraints and limited institutional resources. Data were collected through 27 semi-structured interviews with school principals and analyzed through a theoretically informed codebook thematic analysis using semantic and latent coding. Principals’ accounts portray effective leadership as primarily enacted through relational and adaptive practices grounded in trust, collaboration, and a holistic vision of student development extending beyond academic achievement. Schools are perceived as communities sustained by shared responsibility, while principals navigate persistent challenges associated with inadequate infrastructure, financial limitations, bureaucratic demands, and students’ socio-economic circumstances. The findings further suggest that principals’ professional identities emerge through diverse motivational pathways and that school reputation is shaped by the interaction between observable educational quality and long-term relational trust within the community. These findings contribute context-specific evidence to the international literature on educational leadership in developing and transition settings and highlight the need for policies that strengthen school leadership capacity, reduce administrative burdens, and support context-responsive professional development for school principals.