Psychological Predictors of Teachers’ Willingness to Become School Principals: The Role of Big Five Personality Traits and Motivation to Lead

Despite growing concerns regarding the declining pool of candidates for school principalship, the psychological and organizational determinants of leadership aspiration remain under-explored in non-Western, centralized education systems. This study investigates the predictive role of Big Five personality traits, Perceived Institutional Support (PIS), and Motivation to Lead (MTL) on teachers’ Willingness to Become a School Principal (WBSP). Data were collected from 417 primary school teachers in Ankara, Türkiye, and analyzed using hierarchical regression and bootstrapping mediation. PIS was unrelated to WBSP at the zero-order level and in no model showed the positive association predicted by social exchange theory; the small negative coefficient it acquired under statistical control is read as suppression. This pattern is consistent with a structural decoupling between school-level support and centrally governed career advancement. Openness to experience was a significant positive predictor when the Big Five were entered, and neuroticism a significant negative predictor once MTL was controlled, in line with findings from decentralized systems. MTL was the strongest predictor and was positively associated with WBSP, supporting the decentralized expectation rather than the competing decoupling hypothesis. No indirect effect through MTL was statistically significant. The motivational and dispositional antecedents of aspiration to the principalship thus appear to operate in a centralized system much as in decentralized ones, whereas institutional support does not, with implications for leadership succession in centralized educational systems.