A component model and indicators of supervisory leadership for primary school administrators in Northeastern Thailand

Despite growing international recognition of supervisory leadership as a mechanism for improving teaching quality, many primary schools in Northeastern Thailand—particularly those in rural, resource-constrained areas—continue to experience unclear supervisory systems, inconsistent implementation, and insufficient follow-up on teacher development, and no synthesized framework of supervisory leadership has yet been empirically examined for this context. This research aimed to: (1) investigate the components and indicators of supervisory leadership (SL) among primary school administrators in Northeastern Thailand, and (2) examine the goodness-of-fit of the resulting component and indicator model against empirical data. An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods design (instrument-development model) was employed, in which qualitative findings from Phase 1 directly informed (built) the quantitative instrument tested in Phase 2. Phase 1 comprised a narrative document synthesis and semi-structured interviews with nine purposively selected experts. Phase 2 collected quantitative data from 680 school administrators and academic teachers across 340 schools using multi-stage random sampling. The instrument was a five-point Likert scale questionnaire with a reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s α) of 0.93. Data were analyzed using second-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with maximum-likelihood estimation. Results supported a five-component, 15-indicator structure of SL: (1) Curriculum and Instructional Management (β = 0.946), (2) Positive Communication (β = 0.918), (3) Decision-Making Ability (β = 0.913), (4) Supervision Evaluation and Assessment (β = 0.904), and (5) Teacher Professional Development (β = 0.884). The final, modification-index-guided model showed a favorable fit to the sample covariance structure (χ² = 95.693, df = 82, p = .143, χ²/df = 1.167, RMSEA = 0.016, SRMR = 0.014, CFI = 0.999, TLI = 0.999); this fit, however, should be read together with several disclosed caveats—non-normal item distributions, a ceiling effect, unmodeled clustering from the two-respondents-per-school sampling design, and reliance on a maximum-likelihood estimator not fully robust to these conditions (Sect. 6.3 )—which qualify how strongly it can be taken as evidence of the model’s robustness. Within these limits, the findings support supervisory leadership as a multidimensional competency integrating interpersonal, academic-administrative, and professional-development dimensions in this sample and context. The five-component structure is one empirically supported configuration among several conceptualizations of supervisory leadership documented in the international literature, rather than an exhaustive account of the construct, and its transferability beyond Northeastern Thailand remains a hypothesis for future replication.